Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum turns 100: a free exhibition in Ueno traces the story of Japan's first public art museum from 19 November

The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, in Tokyo's Ueno Park, opens an exhibition about its own first century on 19 November 2026. Titled in English "The History of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum", it runs until 11 January 2027 in the museum's Gallery B, and admission is free.

The show is built from archives rather than artworks. Postcards, architectural drawings, exhibition catalogues, posters and installation photographs carry visitors through a prologue, five chapters and an epilogue. Photographs of the museum taken by members of the public, collected through an open call that began in 2025, are shown alongside them.

The museum opened on 1 May 1926 as the Tokyo Prefectural Art Museum, and describes itself as Japan's first public art museum. The trigger was a newspaper article. On 17 March 1922 the daily Jiji Shinpō argued that Japan needed a permanent art museum; Satō Keitarō (1868–1940), a coal merchant from Kitakyushu in southern Japan, read it and donated 1 million yen for construction. The first exhibition showed about 1,000 works, and in its first year the museum drew 473,434 visitors to ten open-entry exhibitions.

The original building, by Okada Shin'ichirō, was a European classical design with colonnaded entrances on all four sides. The present one was designed by Maekawa Kunio (1905–1986), who had worked under Le Corbusier in France from 1928, and was completed in September 1975. Rules protecting the park's scenery cap building height at 15 metres, while the plan called for nearly doubling the floor area from about 17,000 to about 31,000 square metres. The answer was to put roughly 60 percent of the building underground, which is why visitors enter on the first basement level.

What sets this museum apart is its long role as a venue where artists' associations hold their own exhibitions. Its collection was transferred to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo when that museum opened in 1995, and after a renovation in 2012 it resumed organising its own shows. By the museum's count it now hosts about ten special and thematic exhibitions and more than 250 exhibitions by art groups and schools each year, with about 2 million visitors annually.

A second free exhibition runs on the same dates in Galleries A and C. "Ways of Reading", the closing project of the centenary programme, presents five artists, among them the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, the poet Tanikawa Shuntarō and the sculptor Sunazawa Bikky.