Dropping into an art museum and having your mind explode in wonder won’t be happening for several more weeks yet if predictions hold. Fortunately, we have an old girl of 150 to thank for taking the splendor and brilliance of a world class art institution and sliding it onto the digital highway.
What New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) has done with its online offerings is outrageously generous and just as beautiful. From glorious peeks into current exhibitions to Met Stories, where respected arts specialists and noted cultural luminaries talk about an endless range of aesthetic expression, the museum’s digital repository is vast. Listening to Kent Monkman discuss and present his commissioned triumph, The Wooden Boat People https://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/video/collections/modern/kent-monkman-great-hall-mistikosiwak-wooden-boat-people, now anchoring the museum’s grand hall; or Wangechi Muh as she looks back on the process of creating her arresting and regal sculptures, The New Ones Will Free Us https://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/video/collections/modern/wangechi-mutu-the-new-ones-will-free-us, now sitting sentry at the museum’s entrance, is to not only slip into the minds of two fiercely gifted artists, but also see how art leaves the imagination and becomes real.
With breathtaking photography throughout, this is a site you can easily spend hours exploring and return to over and over: www.metmuseum.org.
Locally, both the Art Institute https://www.artic.edu/ and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) do their part in keeping us in touch with our own treasures closer to home.
