The Artist Project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
How does an art museum founded way back in 1870 continue to capture the imagination and interest of a 21st century audience whose aesthetic vocabulary extends to jpegs, tiffs, pngs, gifs and other digitally generated and enhanced images on Instagram?
The answer is elementary for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka the Met), which created an online video series entitled The Artist Project to digitally connect to web users all over the world. Through the Met’s online platform, viewers can virtually meet a diverse group of 100 artists who will share their insights on specific pieces of art in the Met’s collection.
“We have spoken a lot lately about the Met’s interest in looking at contemporary art through the lens of our historical collections,” says the Museum’s Director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell. “The Artist Project gives you a glimpse of just what we mean when we talk about that kind of connected view of contemporary art. This innovative online series gives visibility to something we’ve known about the Met for a long time: it is a place of critical inspiration for working artists, often in unexpected ways. I’m excited to share these engaging and beautifully edited episodes with the public.”
Initially launched in March of this year with Season 1, the entire series will be presented in five seasons, featuring 20 episodes of each, throughout the course of the year.
Season 2, which was just released at the end of last month, features input from artists such as: Roz Chast, Willie Cole, Teresita Fernández, Spencer Finch, Roland Flexner, Jeffrey Gibson, Y.Z. Kami, Il Lee, Glenn Ligon, Robert Longo, Nalini Malani, Kerry James Marshall, Mariko Mori, Robert Polidori, Rona Pondick, David Salle, Pat Steir, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sarah Sze, and Hank Willis Thomas.
The online art series will continue with the release of Season 3 on September 14; Season 4 on December 7, 2015; and Season 5 on February 29, 2016. All of these Seasons, as well as Season 1 and Season 2, can be viewed at http://artistproject.metmuseum.org.
The Artist Project is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, of which Campbell notes, “We are enormously grateful to Bloomberg Philanthropies for having the foresight to support this new online series as part of their Bloomberg Connects program. Their dedicated support helps deliver the Met experience around the world.”
