NEW YORK (AP) – It has been used to crown kings and fill cavities, for high-end jewelry and high-flying space travel.

For thousands of years, in practically every culture that has been exposed to it, gold has represented wealth, power, and prestige. A new exhibit showcases just how remarkable this rare and precious material is. “Gold” opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History and runs through Aug. 19.

Gold is a unique mineral in a number of ways, said Jim Webster, one of the curators for the show – it’s malleable, so it can be stretched into the slimmest of wires or flattened into the thinnest of sheets. It’s reflective, which is why it has been used on astronauts’ helmets to reduce glare.

It can be worked and handled in its native form, right out of the ground, and doesn’t need to be heated or smelted like other minerals such as copper. And it doesn’t really tarnish or corrode, so even coins on sunken ships that spend hundreds of years on the ocean floor can be found in perfect condition.

“It’s just amazing, the impact it’s had,” Webster said. “Most cultures that have run across it have incorporated it as a symbol of power, strength, and authority.”

And of course, it’s got that lovely glow and luster to it, the only mineral that naturally occurs in that yellow color.

That spectacular shine is on full display in the museum’s exhibit, which all told contains about a ton of gold. Divided into sections, the show starts off with the geology and mineralogy of gold, showcasing the various forms it can be found in such as a 2.2 pound nugget taken from the museum’s collection.

The next section looks at its physical properties, like its heavy density. (Those movie scenes, where someone takes off carrying a bag full of gold bars? Um, not likely. The bag would weigh hundreds of pounds.) Visitors will be able to walk through a special room, 12 feet by 12 feet by 8 feet, that’s completely lined with 22.5 karat gold leaf to see a physical demonstration of how thin gold can get. Gilding the entire space only required three ounces of the material.

Another section focuses on gold’s cultural and artistic importance, its usage in jewelry everywhere from South Asia to the collection of Cartier, which contributed a breathtaking diamond and gold necklace. Further on, its economic importance takes center stage, with coins dating back many, many years as well as a mind-boggling loan from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which lent 27 gold ingots. (The Federal Reserve’s vault in the city is 80 feet below ground and holds $147 billion worth of gold bullion, the world’s largest collection of gold used for monetary purposes.)

All this impact, for a mineral that isn’t even that common. The exhibit points out that in all of recorded time, just over 150,000 metric tons of gold have been ever been mined. If it were all collected into one cube, it would only measure about 20 meters per side. Contrast that to the millions of tons of other minerals that are mined every year.

“All of human history, all the impact it has had, all of that,” Webster said, “we make more iron in 1½ hours.”

The museum has programmed lectures and events to accompany the show. It will travel, but a schedule had not yet been released.

Also on view in November:

• “Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From Bauhaus to the New World,” Whitney Museum of American Art, through Jan. 21: Featuring more than 200 works, this show spans 40 years in the careers of these two giants of Modernism.

• “Ron Mueck,” Brooklyn Museum through Feb. 4: Mueck is known for his lifelike sculptures of people. The exhibit will feature almost a dozen of them.

• “Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford,” Brooklyn Museum, through Jan. 28: The exhibit, featuring more than 50 large-scale watercolors, showcases Ford’s musings on issues like colonialism. Ford’s work uses the animal world to offer commentary on humanity.

• “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian,” The Museum of Modern Art, through Jan. 29: Poor Maximilian! Born into European royalty, he was sent to Mexico to become emperor but was abandoned by those who had put him into power and then shot. This exhibit brings together, for the first time in the United States, works by Edouard Manet marking the emperor’s death.

• “Masterpieces of European Painting from The Cleveland Museum of Art,” The Frick Collection, through Jan. 28: The Cleveland Museum is undergoing a massive expansion project, and is using the opportunity to have some of the holdings from its collection sent to other institutions to be seen by people in other cities. This showing includes works by El Greco, Diego de Velazquez, and Jacques Louis David.

• “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, through Feb. 18: The 1920s were a remarkable period for the arts in Germany, the years after one huge war and before another. This show features 40 paintings and 60 drawings, portraits that provide a window into that time.

• “Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005,” Whitney Museum, through Feb. 11: Smith has worked with a range of material, from glass and bronze to beeswax and prints. This show, which the Whitney calls her first full-scale survey in an American museum, has more than 125 of her works.

• “The Odyssey Continues: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art and from Private New Orleans Collections,” Wildenstein & Co. Gallery on Madison Avenue, Nov. 16 through Feb. 9: Damaged by Hurricane Katrina, the museum is trying raise several million dollars for its recovery. This fundraising show at a Manhattan gallery will display about 100 works of art, mostly from the museum’s collection.

• “Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Nov. 17 through March 28: This is a massive show, covering 500 years of Spanish art, and featuring 135 works from the likes of Diego Velazquez, Joan Miro and Salvador Dali.

• “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War,” New-York Historical Society, Nov. 17 through Sept. 13: This is the third and final part of the museum’s look at slavery and its legacy in New York. This exhibit shows how New York was a contradictory place, home to both the abolition movement as well as the financing and business that helped Southern plantations sell their cotton to the world.

• “Holiday Train Show,” The New York Botanical Garden, Nov. 18 through Jan. 7: In this holiday perennial, trains travel along their tracks passing a number of New York landmarks.

• “Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate,” Metropolitan Museum, Nov. 21 through May 20: Louis Comfort Tiffany spent three years building his Long Island dream house, giving it 84 rooms on eight levels. A fire destroyed it in 1957, but parts like some windows and other elements were salvaged. Those surviving pieces are on display in this show.

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On the Net:

American Museum of Natural History: http://www.amnh.org