Few artists are able to get work placed in prominent museums like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But their employees can.
Titled 'Art Work: Artists Working at the Met', this year’s show features more than 600 pieces -including paintings, etchings, ceramics, embroidery and digital art - made by 640 Met employees who work in a variety of roles, including security guards, technicians, librarians, designers and volunteers.
Actually, the museum has been staging exhibitions featuring employee art since 1935, but this year’s show is only the second in history that’s been open to the public.
Daniel Kershaw, an exhibition design manager, tells Hyperallergic that the number of staff artworks on view has nearly doubled this year in comparison to previous years. “Because of the amount of press that it got last time and the opportunity for the public to see it, everybody decided that they want to put something in,” he says. “It’s just a lot of fun.” Kershaw has an architectural model for a future exhibition on view in the show.
According to the Financial Times: “The show is designed, hung, presented and guarded by that same staff - some of the world’s best - who also design, hang, present and guard the 1.5 million works in its full collection.”
Art Work: Artists Working at the Met is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.