Nadja Hansen, Editorial Assistant, Editorial Department; and Hilary Becker, Administrative Assistant, Editorial Department
Posted: Tuesday, April 30, 2013
«Photography was invented just twenty years before the American Civil War. In many ways the war—its documentation, its soldiers, its battlefields—was the arena of the camera's debut in America. "The medium of photography was very young at the time the war began but it quickly emerged into the medium it is today," says Jeff Rosenheim, curator of the current exhibition Photography and the American Civil War (on view through September 2), and author of its accompanying catalogue. "I think that we are where we are in photographic history, in cultural history, because of what happened during the Civil War . . . it's the crucible of American history. The war changed the idea of what individual freedom meant; we abolished slavery, we unified our country, we did all those things, but with some really interesting new tools, one of which was photography."
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Posted: Monday, April 29, 2013
The Museum offers hundreds of events each month—including lectures, films, tours, family activities, and more. The following listings are just a sample of our upcoming programs.
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Mike Norris, Museum Educator; and Brittany Prieto, Education Programs Associate
Posted: Tuesday, April 23, 2013
«This year, April showers will bring more than just May flowers—they will also bring a free festival inspired by springtime! On Sunday, April 28, visitors of all ages are invited to usher in the season by immersing themselves in the splendors of the Islamic world and the ancient Near East.
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Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO
Posted: Wednesday, April 10, 2013
«Yesterday was an exciting and historic moment for the Met, as we announced the gift of Leonard Lauder's unrivaled collection of seventy-eight Cubist paintings to the Museum. This is among the greatest contributions to the Metropolitan in the course of its 143-year evolution, in the same league as gifts from J.P. Morgan, Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer, Benjamin Altman, Robert Lehman, Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, and Walter Annenberg—truly transformative collections that have come to the Met.
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Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO
Posted: Thursday, April 4, 2013
«In recent weeks, you may have read about a lawsuit filed by one of the Metropolitan Museum's Fifth Avenue neighbors. It inaccurately alleges that the Met deceives the public by not making its long-standing pay-what-you-wish admission policy clear enough, and asserts that we are violating a nineteenth-century New York State law that once mandated that we be free to the public. This was followed by a second legal action, filed by the same law firm, seeking monetary damages.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Friday, March 15, 2013
«One hundred years ago this weekend, on March 17, 1913, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its first painting by the French Post-Impressionist master Paul Cézanne. The Museum purchased Cézanne's View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph at the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art, popularly known as the Armory Show.
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Kate Dobie, Associate Development Officer
Posted: Monday, March 4, 2013
«On Monday, February 4, the Met hosted its twenty-first annual Family Benefit for families with kids of all ages. This year's theme, heroes and heroines, was a huge hit with parents and children alike.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Friday, March 1, 2013
One hundred and forty years ago today, on March 1, 1873, The Metropolitan Museum of Art signed a lease for the Douglas Mansion, located at 128 West 14th Street in Manhattan. The rapidly expanding museum had outgrown its original location in the Dodworth Building in midtown and was in need of additional gallery space.
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Jennette Mullaney, Former Associate Email Marketing Manager, Department of Digital Media
Posted: Friday, February 8, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum has a long history of making its collections accessible to blind and partially sighted visitors through touch and description. In the 1970s, the Museum established the Touch Collection, a group of small artworks from different curatorial departments, for the purpose of tactile exploration by blind and partially sighted visitors. Since 1998, these visitors have been invited to engage with a range of Museum objects through touch tours—guided or self-guided visits in which they can explore specific objects with their hands. For several years, photographer Matt Ducklo has captured participants on these tours at the Metropolitan and other museums, creating a body of work that explores how all people—both sighted and otherwise—experience art. I interviewed Matt about his work and how it has affected his own experience of looking at art.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Monday, February 4, 2013
On Monday, February 4, 1963, a unique visitor entered The Metropolitan Museum of Art and remained in the building for the next three and a half weeks. Over one million people clamored to see her during her stay at the Museum, and the press reported extensively on her visit. To the great pleasure of the Metropolitan and its visitors, the Mona Lisa—perhaps the best known painting in the world—had come to the Museum as a loan from the Louvre.
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Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO
Posted: Friday, February 1, 2013
We have just launched 82nd & Fifth, a new Web feature that asks one hundred curators from across the Museum to each talk about a work of art from the Met's collection that changed the way they see the world. One work. One curator. Two minutes at a time.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Wednesday, January 16, 2013
On Friday, May 9, 1913, the ship La France steamed into New York Harbor carrying William Henry Riggs, a wealthy American and lifelong collector of arms and armor. Riggs was returning from France to his native city for the first time in over forty years in order to donate his impressive collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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P. Grace Hernandez, 2010–12 Polaire Weissman Fellow, The Costume Institute
Posted: Monday, January 14, 2013
When the Brooklyn Museum transferred its costume collection to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute in January 2009, the Met acquired an impressive array of garments from renowned European and American designers. Some highlights from the collection were featured in the related 2010 exhibitions American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity at the Met and American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection at the Brooklyn Museum. Yet the collection also contains a set of objects with noteworthy local origins: garments and accessories made by Brooklyn-based clothing and accessory makers—milliners, tailors, and dressmakers—working independently or in department stores during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Donald J. La Rocca, Curator, Arms and Armor
Posted: Wednesday, January 2, 2013
One hundred years ago, on October 28, 1912, the Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art officially created the Department of Arms and Armor. From relatively modest beginnings, the department rapidly developed into one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of its type in the world.
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Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO
Posted: Tuesday, December 11, 2012
I am thrilled to announce that Thomas Hart Benton's epic mural America Today—a sweeping panorama of American life, has been donated by AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Claire Moore, Assistant Museum Educator
Posted: Friday, November 30, 2012
The importance of the Islamic world within current geopolitics and the global context in which we live makes the study of these regions essential in K–12 classrooms around the world.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Wednesday, November 21, 2012
One hundred and thirty-seven years ago this weekend, on November 24, 1875, the American businessman and philanthropist William Backhouse Astor died. Just three years earlier, Astor had been responsible for a milestone in Metropolitan Museum of Art history: donating to the newly established institution its first work of art made by an American, the marble statue California by Hiram Powers.
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Aleksandr Gelfand, Intern, Museum Archives
Posted: Friday, October 26, 2012
October 28, 2012, marks the centennial of the election of Edward S. Harkness as Trustee and Fellow for Life of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A lifelong philanthropist estimated to have donated one hundred million dollars to charity, Harkness spent twenty-eight years working on the Museum's behalf. A number of his gifts are among the most beloved and visited works of art within the Met's exhibition galleries.
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Femke Speelberg, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints
Posted: Tuesday, October 23, 2012
In 1593, the Florence-born artist, Antonio Tempesta (1555–1630), published one of his absolute masterpieces in print: a View of Rome composed out of twelve folio-sized, etched plates. When joined together in two rows of six, the print forms an impressive frieze measuring almost 3.5 by 8 feet (fig. 1).
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Molly Kysar, Assistant Museum Educator for Gallery and Studio Programs, Education; and Brittany Prieto, Education Programs Associate
Posted: Monday, October 22, 2012
Visitors of all ages are invited to join us this Friday, October 26, for Fright Night!, an evening of dark tales, photography workshops, drawing activities, films, and more. Inspired by the eerie images in the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, the festivities will allow visitors to connect to the exhibition and the Museum's collections in a variety of spooky ways.
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