From the desk of Max Hollein
director@metmuseum.org
Dear Friends of The Met,
I hope this email finds you safe and healthy at home. Since we announced our decision to close the Museum a mere three weeks ago, the world around us has become unrecognizable. Protecting our staff, volunteers, and visitors remains our first priority, and keeping the Museum closed and our staff at home is crucial to fighting the coronavirus pandemic. These are unprecedented and challenging times for all of us, still The Met is not just a place that you can visit, but has many other ways to engage its audience. Despite the uncertainty we all face, I want to share with you some of the remarkable stories of how The Met community, like everyone around the world, has been thinking about how we can meaningfully contribute to the effort to stem the spread of COVID-19, aid those in distress, remain an active, vibrant, and accessible institution, and continue to plan thoughtfully for the future.
Our robust emergency plan is reliant on the dedication of a group of essential staff who are still reporting to work onsite, maintaining our infrastructure and checking on the condition of the art. One of the privileges of being Director is that I have been able to come to the Museum periodically, and I have personally witnessed the heroic work of teams from Security, Buildings, Custodial, Pest Management, Construction, and the Collections Care group, among others. Please join me in thanking them for their dedication and outstanding efforts.
The mornings that I walk through the empty Great Hall, where even the famous flowers are gone for now (although Kent Monkman's majestic paintings are there to keep me company), I think about how we cannot wait to welcome visitors and staff back to the Museum—once it is safe again. But I am heartened that even though our physical spaces are closed, The Met's mission in our new shared reality remains the same, and that we have many ways to engage our audiences even during this time of closure. We know that art has the power to provide joy and comfort, foster understanding and compassion, and enlighten our lives, especially in the most difficult circumstances.
After we ensured that our people and our collections were safe, we began working creatively to bring The Met collection, our digital content, and our staff expertise into people's homes around the world. The Digital, Social Media, and Education teams have led these efforts, which we are calling #MetAnywhere, and we invite you to experience all that The Met has to offer, no matter where you are right now. Let me highlight a few of those activities:
• Visitors can explore our completely remodeled website metmuseum.org to find a broad range of engaging resources, including Primers on many of our exhibitions (e.g. the recently opened British Galleries), the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, educational materials for teachers, students, and families, and much more. I spent some time the other night in the section on early histories of photography in West Africa (1860–1910), which I encourage you to read.
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The Mother of Us All
We are using our website, Facebook, and YouTube to share live streams and exclusive videos. Tonight, Friday, April 3, at 7 p.m., you can watch a recording of The Mother of Us All, a groundbreaking American opera that was performed at The Met earlier this year. Next Saturday, we will also have the exclusive digital premiere of the full-length documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, which is featured in the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Painting After All at The Met Breuer.
• Also make sure to follow our yearlong Met Stories project. It shares unexpected and compelling stories gathered from the many people who visit The Met, whether artists, teachers, curators, actors, Museum staff, designers, thought-leaders, or public figures.
• On our social media, you will find great ways to engage with our collection, mission, and staff. Two of my favorite hashtags are #MetSketch, which invites our talented followers to share their drawings, and #MuseumCrushMonday, which we use to recognize the contributions of our museum colleagues around the world. I'm also excited for a new initiative that will share selfies of our essential staff inside the Museum and invite our followers to send digital greetings to them.
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If you have young kids at home, you should tune in to the weekly "Storytime with The Met," as of this week presented online by our amazing library and education staff on YouTube and Facebook. My kids—well, teenagers—may be too old for storytime, but you can guarantee that our family will be checking out the rest of these digital offerings.
• With everyone at home now is the time for some extended reading, and for you to brush up your knowledge on topics like Fencing Illustrations between 1500–1800, American Sportswear in the 1970s, or Pyrotechnics in Prints & Drawings. All of these as well as 1,697 other publications are available online for free on MetPublications.
With our rich digital offerings available throughout the closure, we are also now reorganizing our complex and full exhibition calendar for when we are able to reopen this summer. The marquee shows of our spring season were Making The Met, 1870–2020, the centerpiece exhibition for our anniversary, examining 150 years of Met history; The Costume Institute's About Time: Fashion and Duration, a time-bending exploration of fashion and history; and The Roof Garden Commission: Héctor Zamora, Lattice Detour, a provocative installation about borders, both real and imagined. We had begun installation on all of these shows when we had to close abruptly.
I'm pleased to announce that upon reopening, Making The Met will be our first new show. It will be a fitting exhibition to welcome back visitors, and, of course, to celebrate our 150th anniversary, as it demonstrates how the Museum has weathered past periods of uncertainty, showcasing our institution's resilience—throughout history, and even now. As the images to the left display, it was almost completely installed before our closure—and you can get a sneak peek at the exhibition on our "Making The Met" featured Instagram story. I am also exclusively sharing with you a touching chapter from the Audio Guide, narrated by Steve Martin, and, available for a few days, a free version of the beautiful catalog—you will be the best prepared visitor that comes to see the show and you will certainly be able to impress others with your inside knowledge. Just before the City issued the stay at home order, we invited New York Times art critic Jason Farago to see the exhibition in its unfinished state, and he penned a moving reflection on one of its paintings. He captured how many of us are feeling at this moment: "I could hardly appreciate the privilege of seeing [the painting] all alone at the Met last week, so furious was I that this new plague had deprived us of the balm of art in common."
On our other exhibitions: About Time—the major Costume Institute show that traces the past 150 years of fashion—has found a new place in our calendar and will open in October, and we are hopeful that we will soon enjoy warm summer evenings basking in the new installation on the Cantor Roof Garden. At The Met Breuer, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All opened a mere nine days before the closure. This marvelous retrospective garnered great acclaim from visitors and critics alike, and we are trying our best to extend the show for a few weeks in July.
As we think about the challenges all of us are facing in the wake of the pandemic, The Museum is also supporting a broad effort to advocate for funding for arts and culture organizations that are suffering grave financial distress with #CongressSaveCulture. Reading the posts and comments on social media, I was heartened to see so many express support for our Museum and for the arts in general. We couldn't agree more with one of our Twitter followers who said, "The @metmuseum is helping me teach my kids about art, other cultures, our world and shared humanity through its publications and online resources. Please let Congress know that in addition to airlines and Wall Street we also need institutions like this. #CongressSaveCulture."
I want to share with you two special initiatives that reflect the amazingly diverse skills and generosity of our staff. Our conservation, curatorial, and other departments, working from home, managed to catalogue all the personal protective equipment (PPE) stored in the Museum's labs and work areas, from boxes of nitrile gloves, Tyvek suits, and aprons to surgical booties, goggles, and N95 facemasks. These were then gathered and donated to New York City medical centers most in need of them in order to help the incredible doctors and nurses working tirelessly around the clock to save lives. At the same time, members of our Textile Conservation department and others—many of whom, unsurprisingly, are highly skilled with needle and thread—gathered materials from their labs and have been sewing at home to produce masks for healthcare workers. I'm both inspired by this work, and in shock—who would ever have imagined that Met staff would be able to find ways to aid the healthcare workers on the front lines of the pandemic in New York.
On a personal note, I want to share that my family and I are healthy and safe, hunkered down together at home in Manhattan. We rely on FaceTime to keep in touch with our extended family in Austria, and like many of you, we take solace in the extra time we're spending together (although my teenage kids would perhaps argue that they had other plans for spring break than staying at home with their parents).
Finally, I want to emphasize that despite the challenges we are facing now, the Museum is a strong, active, and engaged institution. In the uncertain days still to come, I have no doubt that museums will continue to perform an invaluable role in lifting spirits, preserving local and international cultures, helping us interpret the world we live in, and bringing together diverse communities, giving us all a sense of solidarity and shared humanity. We hope that you are heartened, as we are, by these tributes to the endurance of the human creative spirit.
All the best and stay safe,
Max Hollein
Director
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
director@metmuseum.org | metmuseum.org
P.S. I would love to hear how you are doing—to know that you are safe, and also to hear your coping strategies. Please feel free to email if you'd like.
