NY Met’s gallery space expanding

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is dramatically expanding its gallery space, spending almost $180 million to display some of the world’s finest classical artworks, which have been sitting in storage, the museum’s director announced Tuesday.

Many of the works have not been seen by the public in decades. About 5,000 stored artworks and objects from ancient Greece and Rome are to join the 2,500 such pieces already on view. The Met’s new galleries also will house 12,000 objects of Islamic art dating from the 7th to the 19th centuries and spanning Muslim cultures from Spain to India.