Connections/Doors

I'm Daniel Kershaw, and my work in the Museum is designing exhibits and permanent galleries.

Doors, to me, are the key between so many different areas in the museum that normally may be oddly

disjunctive and not linked. And those abrupt transitions, I think, are part of the fun of the Met.

It's a confrontation between different kinds of art. It doesn't go down easy all the time.

I think that's part of the charm of it. One of my favorite doors that I've chopped into the building is an odd connection between

the galleries for Oceania

and the Roman galleries. In one direction

is the solid, stone architectural ornaments of ancient Rome, and through that doorway you see a featherweight

Kwoma ceiling made out of bark painted tiles, massive in its scale. Who knew? I didn't expect that connection to evolve that way and it just worked out fantastically, as odd as that juxtaposition is.

Another door that I've cut into the building which I'm really enthusiastic about is this door in the Byzantine galleries. Years ago when they moved a seven-hundred-pound display case out of the way, what I did was to open that door up and to reveal a space underneath it that was never meant to be seen before. It contains

grotty-looking brick and the rough underside of the Great Hall stairs. And it's a perfect spot to show early Christian art from northern Egypt. Most of it was burial-related, and so the fact that this crypt of a space has evolved into a gallery for crypt-based art is just perfectly wonderful.

I've always been passionate, ever since I was a little boy, with the entrance into Perneb's tomb. One of the passageways ends in

what appears to be a standard-issue Egyptian doorway, and yet it's solid stone, it's a fake doorway. I think only the gods were meant to have opened that doorway, but it's a jarring end to that passageway.

To me the most interesting doors in the Museum are those that whet your appetite. I love that monochromatic Charles Sheeler painting showing nothing, just an open door, but the door itself is so fabulously, meticulously detailed, that space beyond is beckoning you.

Some doors just impress me by their scale, and this great photograph by Gustave Le Gray, it's a grand-looking door in a religious structure meant to look even more significant by arch over arch over arch. In a way that's not too dissimilar from

this beautiful Telefolip Door Board. It's about as tall as a tall person is. Hidden in the bottom of it is a round opening symbolizing a bellybutton. And I like the idea of a doorway which is so small that you actually have to slide horizontally through it to get into the big chamber behind it.

I think that in doors there's both the forbidding and the inviting. Between those two instinctive reactions you get from a door

there's endless variations. I've always felt that the most wonderful transitions that doors provide are

those which give you an element of surprise. That what's on one side of the door is so vastly different from what's on the other side of the door.

I like the idea of completely being shocked and bewildered by what's in that transition.

The shape, the form of the doorway itself can also tell you a great deal or mislead you greatly

and those are fun games to play with, as a designer I love to play with that. And we're in an art museum, after all.

It's wonderful where the door isn't just something that leads you between places, but is something unto itself.

I think the transportation is really what the Met's all about.

I think that's what great art does, it serves as a doorway to something else.