The Artist Project: Julie Mehretu

Ever since it was founded in 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been a place where artists come to gain inspiration from works of art from their own time and place, and also from across time and cultures.

The Artist Project is an online series in which we give artists an opportunity to respond to our encyclopedic collection.

From March 2015 to June 2016, we invited 120 artists—local, national, and global—to choose individual works of art or galleries that sparked their imaginations. In this online series, artists reflect on what art is, what inspires them from across 5,000 years of art, and in so doing, they reveal the power of a museum and The Met. Their unique and passionate ways of seeing and experiencing art encourage all museum visitors to look in a personal way.

Over the course of six seasons, The Artist Project shares the perspectives of one hundred and twenty artists with the public, telling us what they see when they look at The Met.