Visitors to The Met Store often ask how our products are selected and produced. Every product created by the Museum is the result of careful research and expert execution by the Metropolitan's staff of art historians, designers, and master craftspeople, who ensure that each reproduction bears the closest possible fidelity to the original. The Metropolitan's reproduction and publication programs are a source of pride to the Museum, not only because they are executed with a focus on quality and attention to art-historical scholarship, but also because publishing and reproducing our collection is part of the original mission of the Museum, and has been a tradition here for over a century.

We aim to make The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection appreciated and understood by the widest and most diverse audience possible, and at the same time support the Museum's scholarly efforts. Proceeds from the sale of all products in The Met Store directly benefit the Museum's collection and programs.

The Molding Studio

As the supervisor and master-moldmaker of the Molding Studio at the Metropolitan, Ron Street is responsible for creating reproductions of sculptures and other three-dimensional works of art in the Museum's collection. In collaboration with curators and conservators, he applies molding, modeling, laser scanning, technical drawing, and color sampling techniques to create extremely detailed epoxy prototypes derived from the original works of art.

These prototypes, which closely approximate the color and form of the originals, serve as guides for manufacturers who reproduce them in larger quantities for sale in The Met Stores. (Since original works of art are not permitted to leave the Museum for reproduction purposes, the likeness of the cast to the original is of critical importance.) The reproductions are then returned to the Museum, where master craftspeople in the Molding Studio patinate each piece by hand in order to match the original artwork's finish and texture.

Molding Reliefs in Pyramids at Lisht, Egypt
Sometimes, when works of art are still under excavation, too large to move, or otherwise difficult to access, Mr. Street goes off-site to make molds for the Metropolitan. These molds are used both to create reproductions for sale and also to make casts of the originals for curators' research, inclusion in Museum installations, or eventual publication in exhibition catalogues.

In September of 1998, Dorothea Arnold, Lila Acheson Wallace Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Egyptian Art, was in the process of preparing a major exhibition of Egyptian art of the Old Kingdom (2650–2150 B.C.E.), which was on view at the Metropolitan from September 16, 1999, to January 9, 2000. The Metropolitan's excavation team, supervised by Dieter Arnold, curator, and Adela Oppenheim, research associate, worked with the Egyptian Antiquities Organization to study the pyramid complex of Amenemhat I (ca. 1970 B.C.E.), one of two located in Lisht, a village about fifty-six miles south of Cairo.

During the excavation, workers found exposed reliefs on some of the blocks inside a "robbers' tunnel" that ran parallel to the entrance chamber. Since members of the Metropolitan's excavation team knew that it was common for builders of pyramids and other architectural structures to take stones from older sites and reuse them for new buildings, they were curious about the origin of the reliefs. It was later discovered that the reliefs had been taken from Giza, the site of the Great Pyramids.

Because the three reliefs could not be removed from the pyramid—they are about 150 feet from the entrance and thirty feet below ground—Mr. Street was asked to mold them inside the tunnel. The illustration shows one of the molds he made from a large granite stone that had once been part of the court of the pyramid temple of Khafre (2520–2494 B.C.E.) at Giza. Mr. Street later used the molds to make reproductions of the reliefs from fiberglass-reinforced epoxy resin, which were sent to the Metropolitan for inclusion in the exhibition.

For more information about the reliefs found at Lisht, as well as other fascinating archaeological narratives, see the exhibition's richly illustrated catalogue, Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, available in the online Met Store (see Books).