Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Art museum in Ueno Park, Japan.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum is an art museum in Ueno Park that brings together several exhibition spaces within a modern building. The architecture divides into different areas for temporary exhibitions, spread across multiple floors and connected by wide corridors.
The building opened in 1926 as the first public art museum in Japan and served as a model for other cultural institutions across the country. A new main structure replaced the original in 1975, shaping the appearance visitors see today within the park.
The museum's nickname, Tobi, short for Tokyo-to Bijutsukan, is used on signage and by the exhibition groups that rent its galleries. Since 1995, when the contemporary collection moved to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Koto Ward, the halls have mainly hosted open-call exhibitions by artists' associations and shows co-organised with newspapers. The 2012 reopening show of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Mauritshuis drew an average of 10,573 visitors a day.
The museum sits about seven minutes on foot from Ueno Station in the northern part of the park. Entrances are at ground level, and exhibition spaces spread across different floors, all accessible by elevator.
The 1975 building by Kunio Maekawa was designed around Ueno Park's green space, and critics praised it as avant-garde yet harmonious with the park. The original 1926 building by Shinichiro Okada was demolished by 1977, and its site became parkland. The museum's nickname is Tobi.
The community of curious travelers
AroundUs brings together thousands of curated places, local tips, and hidden gems, enriched daily by 93,161 contributors worldwide.
