Met Stories

Charming series of short videos on the Metropolitan Museums website to share stories gathered from visitors to the museum about what it means to them.

This is part of an initiative to mark 150 years since the founding of the Museum and at the time of writing there were four episodes on the site covering nine different people. I loved the fact it includes well known people but also members of the museum staff and cultural figures.

I enjoyed the chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s piece which compared the experience of viewing art to that of eating a shared meal with lovely pictures of food from the collection running in the background and Tim Gunn, host of Project Runway talking about how he realised designers didn’t know about the history of fashion so he started bringing students to the museum to not only show them the fashion collection but also the ancient statues and Great Master paintings.

I enjoyed two pieces by museum staff. Stephane Post, a photo archivist, talked about her research while cataloguing a collection of photographs taken by other museum employees over the years and Jenita Pettway, a software QA specialist, talked about discovering Black American artists through checking the software and catalogue entries.

Most charming so far though was the ballet dancer, Silas Farley, talking about the connections between art and ballet and how he draws inspiration from repetitive patterns and the expression in brush strokes. It ended with a brief dance of him recreating the gestures in Rodin’s Burghers of Calais.

Another page to bookmark and check out regularly.