At The Met’s exhibition galleries, *Creatures of Myth and Imagination: Europe and the Americas* traces how societies pictured the unknown through hybrids, beasts, and other invented beings. The show moves across centuries and materials, linking European allegory to American reinventions shaped by conquest, religion, and local folklore. In New York, it reads as a compact study of how museums have inherited these images and repurposed them as art objects. One quiet takeaway is how often “monsters” functioned as a way to label outsiders and anxieties.