Immaterial: 5,000 Years of Art, One Material at a Time

Time: Keeping Digital Art Alive

How do art conservators save video art from obsolescence? If a painting on canvas rips or a marble sculpture shatters to pieces, art conservators are trained to respond

Wood: The Most Musical Tree in the World

How did one tree become a world-famous tonewood for guitars? Deep in the forests of Belize, a wood importer from Florida discovered a rare tree that produced a sound un

Trash: The Archaeology of Rubbish

An archaeologist and an artist walk into a dump…  For most of us, we throw our garbage to the curb, and it disappears from our lives. But to some, that’s just the begin

Chia: Beyond Superfoods and Infomercials

What can the tiny chia seed reveal about the history of oil painting? For centuries, one of the most prized mediums of art at museums like the Met has been oil painting

Blankets and Quilts: Threads of Identity

What happens when our most intimate possessions end up in art museums? Blankets comfort and keep us warm. They accompany us through our lives. They are keepers of some

Space, Part 2: Behind the Scenes at The Met

What is hidden in the 'empty' spaces of an art museum? The Met is more than a museum of art. It is a city unto itself: population 2,000, with a transient population of

Space, Part 1: Giving Form to a Feeling

How does an artist give presence to absence? Bronze, wood, paint, and stone—classic materials for art making. But what if you're trying and struggling to convey a vast

Stone: Making and Breaking Legacies

What happens when the unbreakable breaks? Throughout art museums around the world, you’ll find ancient stone statues of rulers and marble monuments immortalizing noblem

Introducing: Immaterial Season 2

What is hiding in the material choices of artists and makers? Immaterial, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s marquee podcast, is back with eight more episodes that reveal

Bonus Episode: Tarot

Grab a cup of tea and join us for a bonus episode on tarot. We learn about the cards from their patrician origins to the present day, when tarot is being used to subvert

Metals, Part Two

In the second part of our alchemical journey, we meet what ancient philosophers called the “noble” metals: mercury, silver, and gold. How did a nineteenth-century set des

Metals, Part One

Philosophers and scientists have tried for millennia to crack the code of alchemy: the art of turning lead into gold. But alchemy goes much deeper than that—it gives us a

Linen

Take a spin through The Met and you’ll find thousands of items made from linen. From a 3,500 year old sheet from Ancient Egypt, to a Giorgio Armani suit from the 1980s, l

Jade

Deep in the riverbeds of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, you’ll find a stone that’s as hard as steel and as green as the first breath of the earth. It’s called pouna

Shells

It all begins with a sea creature—a snail called a conch—and the mathematically perfect spiral it transforms into a home, which we humans then put to our lips and play li

Clay

In seventeenth-century Europe, some of the wealthiest women in the world were doing something strange with the ceramic jars in their curiosity cabinets. They were eating

Concrete

Concrete is full of contradictions. First it’s dust, then liquid, then hard as stone. It’s both rough and smooth, it’s modern and ancient, it can preserve history or play

Paper

Valentines, comic books, cigarette cards and more—all of these objects can be meaningful, but what does it mean to house them in a museum? Paper holds our memories, our s

Introducing: Immaterial

Introducing Immaterial, a brand new podcast from The Met. Hosted by poet Camille T. Dungy, Immaterial examines the materials of art and what they can reveal about history