The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a famous destination for art enthusiasts, so it should come as no surprise that those on its staff are some of the biggest art lovers to pass through its galleries and corridors every day of the week (except Wednesdays).
“There’s definitely a community around art in the museum that’s different from other places,” Amanda Rothschild, an employee in the museum’s technology department, told Hyperallergic on Tuesday afternoon, November 26. Her work is among the nearly 700 included in Art Work: Artists Working at The Met, a sweeping survey spotlighting the talents and creativity of The Met’s staff. Like many of her colleagues, Rothschild took a moment in her workday to peruse the show, which features her 2020 painting of a sink in a Greenpoint coffee shop.
On view in Gallery 199 through December 1, the show is part of a biannual Met tradition since 1935, but this is only the second time it has been open to the public. And much like the museum’s own encyclopedic collection, it is a hodgepodge of paintings, embroidery, ceramics, digital art, etchings, and even taxidermy by 640 staffers across every department in the museum, from librarians, conservators, and technicians to security staff and volunteers.
Exhibition Design Manager Daniel Kershaw, who has overseen the installation of the show for the last three decades, told Hyperallergic that this year’s edition has nearly double the works of past exhibitions.
“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,” Kershaw said. The installation took six days plus a few long evenings and some work over the weekend.
“It was completely beyond anything I’ve ever dealt with before,” Kershaw said. Still, he maintained: “It’s just a lot of fun.”
Kershaw, like many of his colleagues, has work in the show — an architectural model for a future exhibition that will be publicized at a later date. It is displayed across from a digital photo print and pen sketch entitled “Shore Dream” (2022) by security staffer Thom Gallucio, who said he made the work as an homage to Seaside Heights. He considers himself more of a musician than a visual artist, but he told Hyperallergic that he always participates in the staff shows, usually contributing sketches.
Further down the wall hangs a photographic portrait and a bubblegum-pink dress, which is visitor experience coordinator Henry Schreibman’s reinterpretation of Laura Wheeler Waring’s painting “Girl in Pink Dress” (1927) included in the museum’s recent Harlem Renaissance exhibition. Around the corner in a side room, a caricatured sculpture of President-elect Donald Trump as a baby by security staffer Lambert Fernando is on display adjacent to a massive oil painting of Kamala Harris holding a bejeweled saber, inscribed with metallic text that reads, “We Are Not Going Back…” The work, named after Harris, is by museum volunteer Roxanna Melendez.
“Everyone has the capacity to make art,” Micah Pegues, a video producer on The Met’s social media team, told Hyperallergic. This year was also her first time participating in the show, which she described as a “uniting experience.” She contributed a woven photographic work entitled “Collapsed Time” (2024), consisting of interlaced photographs of her great aunt and her great-great-grandparents from a family reunion in Muskogee, Oklahoma. It is on view above an intricate quilt by volunteer Amy Olsen, in the same room as Johnathan Lewis’s taxidermied mouse, portrayed as an artist holding a palette in one paw and a red paintbrush in the other.
“It’s really a testament to the people who work at this museum,” Pegues said.
