ART SCENE
THE WORLD’S THIRD MOST-VISITED ART MUSEUM IS MARKING 150 YEARS SINCE ITS FOUNDATION WITH A BLOCKBUSTER EXHIBITION, REDESIGNED GALLERIES, AND SPECIAL EVENTS.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art marks its 150th anniversary.
The New York businessmen, civic leaders, and artists who banded together in 1870 to form a public institution for “encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts,” and “advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects” couldn’t have known that their project would blossom into the United States’ largest art museum and one of the city’s top attractions. Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art ( metmuseum .org) is spread across three locations, and culture vultures have even more reason to visit this year thanks to the institution’s sesquicentennial celebrations.
At the flagship venue on the edge of Central Park, the British Galleries have been given their first major renovation since opening in the 1980s. Reimagined spaces now gather nearly 700 works under the theme of British decorative arts—encompassing furniture, ceramics, silverware, and tapestries—from the 16th to 19th centuries. The showcase delves deeper into the effects of global trade on local craftsmanship as the British Empire expanded to its greatest extent; one gallery contrasts the artistic beauty of 100 English teapots with the realities of colonial rule, illustrating how an insatiable appetite for tea drove the exploitation of humans and the natural world.
Beyond the exhibits, visitors can look forward to a summer jamboree. A three-day celebration from June 4–6 will involve a fundraising gala and dance party the first night, a symposium on the fifth that segues into evening performances, tours, and workshops led by curators and artists, followed by outdoor events and activities throughout the museum on the final day.
But the centerpiece of the anniversary fête is the headline exhibition “Making The Met, 1870–2020.” Running until August 2, it will take visitors through a broad sweep of the museum’s history, chronicling the evolution of its encyclopedic collection into 10 periods, and display more than 250 works of art like NightShining White, an eighth-century Tang Dynasty ink painting commissioned by Emperor Xuanzong, and Edgar Degas’s bronze sculpture Little Fourteen-YearOld Dancer. A statue of the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut anchors a section that presents the ethical dilemmas of Western-sponsored archaeological digs in the Middle East and North Africa during the 1920s and 30s; the next segment looks at the wartime role of the museum and how its staff aided the so-called Monuments Men, who were tasked with safeguarding Europe’s cultural treasures amid the Nazi retreat.
“Making The Met, 1870–2020” eventually turns its attention to major acquisitions from the last three decades, before focusing on Met director Max Hollein’s vision for the future, with artworks presented in rich contextual narratives that highlight the complexity of the wider socio-political forces at play and the interconnectedness of cultures. In a post-truth and ever inward-looking world dominated by demagogues, that sends a very clear message.