The Museum of the City of New York exhibition, Gilded New York, showcases beautiful design objects from New York’s Gilded Age as visual markers of the city’s metamorphosis into cultural capital. The new Tiffany & Co. Foundation Gallery, located on the City Museum’s third floor, will feature newly constructed, state-of-the-art display cases that evoke a Gilded Age domestic interior finished with herringbone wood flooring, decorative wallpaper, mirrored window shutters, draperies, as well as a historic chandelier and fireplace mantel from the Museum’s collections.

Gilded New York will be on view until November 30, 2014 and is a vivid exploration of the city’s visual culture at the end of the 19th century, when its elite class expressed their high status through extravagant fashions, jewelry, and decorative arts. Although often derided for its excess, the Gilded Age was also notable for its national aspirations in the arts and design. During these years, the United States—and its cultural capital, New York City—achieved a new level of sophistication in painting, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts, enabling the nation to compete for the first time on a world stage and giving rise to a golden age that was worthy of the name “American Renaissance.”