 Hello, good evening everybody, good evening, thank you. Welcome to Quick Center for the Arts, welcome to the Open Visions Forum, and we really enjoy having these intimate programs here in the black box. My name is Philip Eliasoff, I teach art history here and I'm the director of the Open Visions Forum. First let me thank our sponsors for the Open Visions Forum Espresso series, these smaller gatherings. The law firm of Cone and Wolf generously supports this endeavor. I also want to thank my colleagues not only from the Art History program that are here supporting us, and many of our students are here from Art History. Tonight we had a really wonderful dinner backstage, and you really sense that this is really a very collegial feeling among colleagues and university administrators and people who are, we had Dean Greenwald was here and Father Blachek from University Mission was here, and I want to thank all of my colleagues who are part of this, especially to the Fairfield University Art Museum for hosting this wonderful dinner. Also actually I would like to thank, we have so many friends and alumni, but I think the people who've traveled the furthest, the students from the class of 1987, Dr. Brian Mockler and his wifi leaner here from the class of 19, they came from New Jersey to be with us. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian. He painted my house when he was a junior, senior year he painted our kitchen, so he never lets me forget that. Everybody, we know that by the time we go to bed tonight or wake up tomorrow because of course the results from California are going to come in very late, but let's think about it the future of the United States is going to be I think determined a little bit up for grabs in terms of who will at least represent the Democrats, at least 34% of the registered Democrats in the country are going to be voting today for 357 Pledge Delegates. So I was thinking about tonight's program and about sort of the pivots and the twist in history and our special guest tonight, Dr. Randall Griffey from the Metropolitan Museum. He's going to take us on a journey about the past and the future as we learn about the history of the museum. Let me introduce my colleague from our art history program and from the class of 1992 who had to suffer through my unbearable art history lectures. Dr. Maurice Rose, how wonderful to have somebody who was a student in my class as now the chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department. The cycle of life is wonderful. Please welcome Dr. Maurice Rose. Maurice, class of 1992. Class of 1992, thank you Philip. It's a great pleasure to introduce Dr. Randall Griffey before he takes us behind the scenes at one of the world's largest and best art museums, the best art museum, let's go with that. Dr. Griffey is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He holds a PhD from the University of Kansas where he recently was awarded the Franklin D. Murphy Distinguished Alumnus Award. His research focuses on American painting and he has published extensively in a wide variety of journals, catalogs, and books. Before coming to New York, he was curator of American art at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri and then at Amherst College's Mead Museum. In his eight years at the Met, Dr. Griffey's installations and exhibitions include some of my favorites presented by any museum in the past few years. For example, Marsden Hartley's Main at the Met Breuer, Thomas Hart Benton's America Today mural and Epic Abstraction Pollock to Herrera at the Main Building on Fifth Avenue. His groundbreaking commission of Kent Monkman's Mystico Seawalk Wooden Boat People is hanging in the Met's great hall right now. Go see it. We can't wait to hear about how the Met is looking back while looking forward as it celebrates its 150th birthday. Join me in welcoming Randall Griffey. All right, thank you very much all around. I will confess up front, I had a couple of glasses of wine at that dinner that was referenced earlier so I might go off script just a little, not that I have one, but might go a little farther off script. But I want to start by, of course, thanking Philip and everyone here that I'm coming to get to know for the invitation to speak here. Philip and I have now known each other about as long as I've been at the Met because I've been aware of his work on various aspects of American art, especially his important and critical work on Paul Cadmus and other areas of kind of under-recognized American visual culture and fine art. So thank you, Philip, for the invitation and I always love to take a break from the city, let someone else do the driving on the train, got a little work done, turned off my phone, so had dinner. What's odd about it is that, and I know I'm pressed for time a little bit, but I love being fed and fedded before I have to work. It's usually I have to dance for my dinner and not the other way around. So we'll see how this goes. That's a little bit out of sequence. So Philip and I chatted just a little bit about what the topic of tonight might be and the obvious thing to consider from my standpoint was the anniversary year that the Met is in the midst of. The actual anniversary comes up next month of the founding of the Met in 1870. So we're at our sesquicentennial, which is a word I've had to practice saying for public audiences like this. And so the Met is indulging in a little bit of naval gazing, I guess, throughout the year, but it's the right time to do it. And a lot of that will coalesce around massive exhibition called Making the Met, 1870 to 2020, which I have played a part. 17 curatorial departments have weighed in on this project. It's a history the institution told through the collections. And my piece really focused on the, there's that wine kicking in, focused on the kind of complicated but wonderfully rich history of modern art at the Met, especially the early 20th century. Of course, the Met is not particularly known for modern art, especially after Museum of Modern Art came online, 1929, 1930, but I had the opportunity to really dig into that history and write this part of the catalog of the catalog that accompanies this show. But I didn't want the night to focus really entirely on looking into the past, but wanted to talk about the Met kind of in the here and now and where it might go in the future. And in that regard, I had the great opportunity as mentioned in the introduction of working on this Great Hall Commission by Kent Monkman, Mr. Goswak, wooden boat people, which is a diptych that's very prominent in the Great Hall. One part of which is here, you see in the lower right-hand corner the painting is called Resurgence of the People, which is an obvious riff on one of the icons in the Met's collection. Emmanuel Loitz is Washington Crossing the Delaware. So a little look back, a little look to the present and maybe to the future. And I think I scared Philip a little bit by the number of my slides that I submitted for tonight's talk, but I pride myself on being punctual and I promise not to go over my allotted time. Don't hold me to that. All right, so just a little brief history of the very origins of the Met, which are wonderfully modest compared to where we are now on Fifth Avenue. On the left is the first building the Met occupied at 681 Fifth Avenue and there's a view in the Harper's Weekly of the opening gathering in 1870. So the Met moved around a little bit early on before we landed like a spaceship in Central Park. Oops, okay. This was acquisition number one. Now had this exhibition been left up to me that I mentioned, this would have kicked off the show and it's this, you can see the Roman sarcophagus. So you can see the acquisition number in the parentheses, 70.1, 1870.1. So first acquisition of 1870. That's the little trick you need to know to read those accession numbers because it tells you quite a lot of useful information. But my colleagues in Greek and Roman art were not keen on showing this sarcophagus which apparently doesn't register quite as highly in quality as other things that came in later. But I just, that's for me, would have been a poignant jumping off point to think of where the Met started and then where it went. But that's accession number one. Few years later moved to the Douglas mansion sorry, 128 West 14th Street. The painting on the right by Frank Waller is probably not exact replication of the interior of those galleries. But again, a temporary space. And during this period from around the 18, into the 1880s the Met then started hatching a plot to move into Central Park. And that's the first building in Central Park which you really can't see now at all because it's embedded in the bigger edifice that's built up and around it. And the, so early building in the midst of building on the left in the 1880 and then this was an early plan possibly by the museum's first director in his hand on the right. And again, knowing that we have a lot to get through I'm not lingering in these images. So there were wings added to that modest building on Central Park moving into around 1900. This is the Western Wing adding on. You can see it starting to, it's like it's getting to the gym, it's beefing, bulking up, beefing up. It's taking those protein shakes. Richard Morse Hunt, turn of the century edition and this is the moment at which the Met encroaches on Fifth Avenue. And you can see the other building we're looking at just beyond. You might recognize the Cleopatra's needle as a touchstone there behind on this postcard. And then now, with McKame Mead and White building on those wings onto Fifth Avenue in the early years of the 20th century the Met starts to resemble the Met that we know today. And then voila, all right. So I love this incremental architectural history although it's not what I wrote about. But it's useful I think to have, I found online a digital animation of this sequential building project. We'll look at here really quickly, it's really short. That's the American Wing. What we think of now is the American Wing coming in there. Mic drop. All right, so don't linger too much on that but I really do love that early architectural history and just looking back to how where we were and where we are now. And one of the key elements of the Susque Centennial Anniversary Celebration is this exhibition that I mentioned. This is the landing page for the exhibition on our website which takes Immanuel Loitz's historic images of Immanuel Loitz's quashing and crossing the Delaware and merges them with a tour that probably has happened just within the last few years to suggest that great flow of time. And again, the part of the story that I was fortunate to tell had to do specifically with the really uneven entree of what we think of as modern art at the Met. And it's a wonderfully complicated and rich story which I'll gloss, I mean I'm not gonna gloss over it here but we'll do a kind of quick overview to give you a sense of all the variables in play. And like a lot of institutional history and I'm sure the institutional history of Fairfield, it's ultimately a story about personalities because institutions of course are made up of personalities and sometimes more effectively than others. But the history of the Met in this sense is does come down to these wonderful histories of people and their relationships with each other. So this is the section that we're focusing on. This is a little snippet of the book called Reckoning with Modernism, which I've co-authored with my colleagues, Doug Eklund and Marilyn Friedman. Doug focused on the history of photography which in a way it's overlaps with mine because of the element of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. You can see the beautiful photograph of Georgie O'Keeffe's hands by Stieglitz on the right hand side. And Marilyn Friedman wonderfully covered the early history and a very important history of actually of decorative arts and design of the early 20th century during this period, more or less going up to and including World War II. So the Met isn't known for modern art but we have a couple of very interesting and notable firsts which is to say technically speaking we were the first US museum to acquire into the collection work by Henri Matisse. Not too many people know that or recognize that and admittedly it's only within very kind of qualified terms but we did receive and you can see a gift of Florence Blumenthal 1910, three Matisse drawings, welcome them into the collection. So admittedly a kind of modest acquisition in the ground scheme of things and they were gifts of a wife of a trustee so we weren't gonna say no. So there was a, we all know how the world works. And but technically the record shows we were the first US museum to acquire works by Matisse in 1910. And what's interesting here because the world is small and overlapping, Mrs. Florence Blumenthal bought them out of a show from Alfred Stieglitz's gallery. To Stieglitz as you may know was among the first promoters of European and well not only European art he was promoting a lot of kind of cutting edge ideas through his various galleries and especially the little galleries, the succession galleries in this early period. But Stieglitz keeps coming back and then O'Keeffe plays a key role as well, you'll see. We're also technically the first US museum to acquire a work by Cezanne. And we acquired this work directly out of the infamous and important historically the show, the Armory Show in 1913. So this is notable as a first especially that the Met makes this kind of market first. Buying a beautiful solid Cezanne by this point in 1913 is a little bit of a safe bet. Of course Cezanne is deceased by this point. He died in 1906. So he in a way already is sort of art of the past but even then it's the first, the record shows. So the Met acquired notable examples of both European and American modern art irregularly in a kind of unpredictable way. And we received this wonderful as a gift in 1911 you can see this terrific painting by George Bellows up the Hudson in 1908. And the Cezanne and the Bellows are paintings that you could enjoy in the galleries if you visited today, tomorrow or next week. They're on view. The drawings can't be shown like Matisse drawings can't be shown on a continuous basis for their light sensitivity. But what's interesting about this is that so Bellows is this moment early 20th century American painting associated with the so-called Ashkan school. And as it turns out the Met's collection of Ashkan and Ashkan adjacent painting is pretty weak compared to impressionism and late 19th century European art because a lot of the Met's trustees were really not on board with these gritty views of New York. And this actually doesn't even quite qualify along the lines of what Robert Henry and other Ashkan paintings were doing. So it becomes a real index of taste over time. So this gift is notable especially in that context. So we also have to keep in mind that the Met's hesitancy to walk too far down the road of cutting edge European modernism had very much to do with also public taste and demand. In 1920, 21 the Met actually had an impressionism post-impressionism show. Huge controversy, huge controversy. Memberships were rescinded, letters came in, pouring in from members of the public, outraged that the Met would show such low art as Cézanne and Renoir, et cetera. And what I'm showing on the left is this sort of like unexceptional catalog of the show of impressionist and post-impressionist art. Here is just one of the write-ups about the controversy. You can see controversy has been raging about the post-impressionist, I'm sorry, I still laugh when I see it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art About is not the right word. Appropos would be better as the discussion has little to do with the art itself which of course is usually the case. But this is just one index of like given the, the Met was not in the business of courting controversy especially at this moment in its history. And so with a blow-up like this, it happens in 1920 and 21. You can kind of begin to understand why they don't wanna go too far down this road because doing so is impossibly inviting controversy. And then the landscape of museums in the city begins to change dramatically and quite quickly. So you may know or some of you may know or the Met actually played a surreptitious role in the founding of the Whitney Museum of American Art because I hear actually some laughing out there. So some of you know that famously in 1929, the Met was offered and declined Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's collection of American art. The same year the Met accepted the great Havamiar collection of European art which was a great kind of case study and where the museum's taste was and priorities were at that moment. And so not to be stymied entirely, these are the conditions under which Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney decides to found her own museum which is a shot of the original structure which is now the New York Studio School downtown, down in the village where that began. So the Met indirectly created the Whitney Museum of American Art but there's more to that story in a moment which a moment, part of that story that even fewer people are aware of. And then of course this happens. So MoMA also founded in 1929, the building, the area of town that we associate MoMA with as they move into this location of a purpose built building in 1939. And this is the moment where the Met is like, all right, we're totally off the hook. We really don't have to go down the road of, especially the scarier parts of European modernism like Cubism and Dada and Surrealism. It's like, okay, we'll let MoMA do that if they want. And this relationship actually becomes codified in a way and with Whitney also in the mix as you'll see. So things get really interesting and wonderfully messy in the 40s. So we turn down Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's offer of her collection in 1929. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney died in 1942 and soon thereafter, Juliana Forse, who had basically been her partner in the Whitney Museum and then also director of the Whitney Museum, went back into discussions with new leadership, newish leadership at the Met. Particularly the director Francis Henry Taylor at this moment, or again during World War II period. And they went back into discussions about building a Whitney wing at the Met and that's what you're looking at below. I don't know if you can make out the writing at the bottom of that diagram says Whitney wing. They were plotting out space for a Whitney wing. And so I guess I asked like, what changed? Why did we turn it down in 29? But then we were a little more interested in 1943, 1944. And a few things changed, one of which is that collection had grown by leaps and bounds in ways that were super enviable. In 1929, they didn't have Edward Hopper's early Sunday morning. 1942, the Whitney Museum had Hopper's classic early Sunday morning, among other treasures. The other backdrop there is that we're in the midst of World War II. So really so much more about anything having to do with American art and culture was more desirable given the wartime circumstances and generally speaking, the Met tended to be more open to aspects of American art than European because throughout, really from the early years of the Met's creation, there was this mission built into the larger institutional mission to kind of Americanize immigrant populations that were coming into and settling in New York. So a lot of the museum's mission statements throughout the late 19th, early 20th century had very much to do with helping immigrant communities adjust to their new home in the US, which ostensibly meant Americanizing them. So there were a few dynamics that played a role here in these new negotiations with Juliana Force, which broke down because they grew to hate one another. And we actually, it took a while, but yeah, they did. And I mean, first of all, Taylor had really very little interest or patience for contemporary American art. And the Met actually had given Juliana Force access to specific acquisition funds designated only for contemporary American painting that the Met didn't know what to do with. So it's like, well, let Juliana Force use them. And she was buying then regularly using the Met's resources out of Whitney shows, building the collection part of which now is part of the Met's collection. So, but they were often locking horns about those acquisitions and prices of those acquisitions. And so at a certain point, Juliana Force just walked off, walked away. But around these same years, and before Juliana Force leaves, the Whitney, the Met, and MoMA decide they really need to come together to parse missions and to clarify what their missions are apart from one another, but in kind of concert with one another. And you can see here in the September 22, 1947 issue of the New York Times that the announcement here is the museums to exchange art to clarify art trends. So the situation here is that under these circumstances, the Met agrees, okay, we are the repository of classic art. The MoMA shows modern art and Whitney concentrates on modern and the art of living American artists. And so this is when the Met's role for a number of years really becomes reified as again as the repository of classic art. Now what's really interesting here is that the Met arranges with MoMA. So early on, this was also part of my education, early on MoMA didn't care about having a permanent collection. They really, the early years of MoMA were meant to be focused on a very specific sliding window of time of about 40 years, but as that 40 year window of time moved that it would trail off. And they weren't really interested, they were gonna be a kunstala, which is like just a temporary exhibition space without really the intent of a permanent collection. Now how do you imagine MoMA today without Paul Cezanne's Great Bathers or Starry Night by Van Gogh or many, many other things that we love at MoMA. But early on that was really not the intent of MoMA. So the Met arranged that MoMA would become a kind of pipeline for modern art as it became classic over time. So that's the way the Met could build its collection is through MoMA's activities. And as MoMA was basically casting off things that were getting too old for them, for their mission, Met was gonna be a beneficiary of that. And then, but one of the crazy, crazy upshots of this. Okay, here's another to sort of museums in accord, three institutions now specify functions. So there was a little bit of additional press about this in the times and elsewhere. So we're in 47 still. But this is one of the amazing upshots of this arrangement with MoMA is we sent Gertrude Stein down to MoMA. One of the icons, especially now one of the icons of the Met's modern holdings under this arrangement with MoMA that we would send down to MoMA things that were technically modern that we happen to have in our collection. So of course, famously Gertrude Stein gave this portrait of her by Picasso to us. And if you can see in the New York Times in January, 1948, a museum start exchange of art. And it says Metropolitan Gertrude Stein by Picasso to be shown in modern gallery. So we're sending it down to start. It was meant to be there for 10 years. But somebody heard about this, Alice B. Toklos. So Alice B. Toklos got wind that we were sharing Gertrude Stein with MoMA, which she wrote in passionately saying it violated the donor's wishes and Gertrude Stein came right back up to the Met. But also part of this arrangement with MoMA is that we for a period of a few years were paying in installments for that art that was meant to be coming through gradually through this pipeline of MoMA or things that MoMA felt were not in its mission. And so there are a few things in the Met's collection that we actually acquired from MoMA that didn't fit these categories. And so this beautiful 20s Picasso, this neoclassical Picasso, a woman in white from 1923. And you can see the last line here. This was part of the Lily Bliss collection, which as some of you may know, it's one of the cornerstones of MoMA's now permanent collection. But under these arrangement rules, it's also kind of the backward-looking Picasso, not the modern Picasso, so the MoMA was less inclined to hold on to it. And it was, we bought it up with a few other things this year, that year. Didn't return it. All right, so just a few minutes on this dynamic duo. They're also playing a part. Now I have to say one of the fascinating things about working on this moment is that, so Alfred Stieglitz, you can see dies in 1947. Very soon after his death, O'Keeffe, who was his executress, which is another hard word to say, reaches out to the Met and other institutions to talk about distributing the great Stieglitz collection. I mean, this is a little bit extra, but William Barr at MoMA knows that we're in discussion with O'Keeffe and he's trying to figure out what great things are in the Stieglitz collection that actually might be then shipped down to MoMA, but that ends up not happening. So there they are. And again, just so many of the key things in our holdings, not only European, not only American, but also European, are come out of this. So Stieglitz has already been holding our feet to the fire on various issues from very early in the 20th century. I mean, he was in dialogue with our first director who said that Stieglitz was a madman or a fanatic for thinking that photography was a fine art. So he was beating on our door for years to accept photography as a fine art, which finally happened in the 30s where parts of the Stieglitz photographic collection started coming in, including these classic Edward Steichen views of the Flatiron building. So there's a long history with Stieglitz even before his bequest starts coming in. So conversations start with O'Keeffe after Stieglitz's death. Here's an excerpt of a letter. And this is so poignant. I mean, she's so smart in going about this in just the right way. But at the first line, as the collection is mostly contemporary work, public opinion concerning it is still being made. If the material is not seen, opinion is not being formed. In case I am sending your institution more than it can hang at one time, I would rather have you loan it to other institutions than not it hang. Not hung, have it hung. Yeah, thanks. So anyway, but that letter from the archives is a gem. So look at what we got out of this. I mean, so it was distributed across big parts of the Stieglitz collection landed in six institutions. The Met was very fortunate to be one of them. And I think that because we're the New York institution of that lot, the Met did particularly well in the distribution. But Vasily Kondinsky is still the only painting by Kondinsky, only oil painting by Kondinsky in the collection. And he bought this also out of the Armory Show where the Met had bought the Cezanne that I mentioned, the Armory Show in 1913, Brincuzzi's Sleeping Muse, and then the great American icons now of American modernism, Demis figure five in gold, a picture near and dear to my heart having worked on Hartley for so many years, portrait of a German officer, which was really only in his collection at this point because it had never sold during the artist's lifetime, which also tells you something. And of course, great work by O'Keeffe. So O'Keeffe and Stieglitz leave a very deep mark. All right, so here we are, 1948, middle of the page, Museum's Abandoned Plan for Coalition. So, I mean, looking back at this as I did, as I got my, started wrapping my head about it, it's like, it's a tale of good intentions, but what were you thinking? Like, how was this ever really gonna work? It's full of good intentions, but it became too complicated. And again, the plan started to fall apart, soon, or as Juliana Forre said, I'm out of here. And then it unraveled gradually from that point on. A problem for our three museums. There was more than one problem. So that's 1948. All right, so there are a few success stories. So, for a period of time, the Met's engagement with contemporary art, especially contemporary American art, was located in the context of the American, what was then the Department of American Paintings, where there were some great things happening. So, acquired in 1957 is our great Pollock drip painting, Autumn Rhythm by Pollock in 1950. Robert Beverly Hale was situated, was placed in the Department of American Paintings, and was prescient in acquiring this within a year of Pollock's death in 1956. And then the first vision of a department devoted to modern contemporary art took formation around 1964, which was when Henry Geltzahler portrayed here in a portrait by Alice Neal, which Alice Neal will be a subject of a full-fledged retrospective at the Met, opening in about a year. I was reading about my essay on the train up here, in fact. So, stay tuned for that opening in about a year, Alice Neal retrospective. But this is our terrific Neal portrait of Henry Geltzahler, who really played not the only player, but one of the key players in what would become the Department of Modern Contemporary Art. And, of course, the Met along the way really missed quite a lot of boats, you know? I mean, with the really entrenched resistance and fear and skepticism about especially avant-garde European modernism, again, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, you know, the collections are really spotty in those areas. And those areas now are in very difficult, if not impossible, to backfill at this point in time. But as you may have read in the Times a few years ago, Leonard Lauder has promised his spectacular collection of Cubism to the Met, which not all of which is actually under our roof at this point, but he's given a few things outright, which have bolstered our holdings of this important period of European modern art that early on had no real play or promise at the Met. But that's looking back. You know, we're gonna look today and take just a few minutes to look forward. And I, like as it was case mentioned in the introduction, I had a great opportunity to work with a living artist, contemporary artist, for a new commission, part of a new set of commissions initiated under our newest director, Max Holine, which is meant to bring contemporary art into new and surprising spaces in the main building on Fifth Avenue. So the first commission was this great, these great sculptures that went into those empty sculptural niches on Fifth Avenue, artwork by Wengechi Mutu. And then I had proposed an artist, I had become interested in a Canadian artist by the name of Kent Monkman for the Great Hall. So I'm just gonna spend a few minutes with about this and then I know we'll have some time for chat and questions. But this is the landing page for the exhibition page on our website. Again, the Kent Monkman, Mr. Gosawak, which is a rough trans, is the indigenous word meaning wooden boat people, which was the phrase by which indigenous people called or referred to specifically French immigrants coming in, but Kent here is using the word to refer to really all varieties of European immigrants and colonizers coming into North America in the early history of North America. So what I'll do is say just a bit about, Phillip asked me just a little bit of background. So one of the first things I did at the Met, I was on the, when I arrived about seven years ago, I was asked to play a minor role in a Plains Indian exhibition that the Met had agreed to show, but organized by another institution. But there was a problem in that the checklist from the organizing institution chronologically ended around 1910, 1920. And the Met said we can't do this show and give the impression that Plains Indian culture isn't living that it ended in 1920. So I was brought on to play a minor role, again a minor role in developing a modern contemporary checklist that would be the end of the show. And it's in this context that I learned about Kent's, Kent Monkman's work and I became very interested in it. In the long, long story short, he ended up not making the final cut for a range of reasons, but it planted a seed that was like we really need to look for an opportunity to work with him because his work is very much invested in the history of art. He works with museum collections, investigates them, interrogates them in his own practice in painting and installation and sculpture. So I was just kind of waiting for the right opportunity. And when I learned that there would be a new commission for the Great Hall, I just like, okay, the light bulb went over my head. Partly because Kent works very much in the kind of vocabulary of European and American history painting. It's very big and bold and audacious. And I just thought, this is gonna look great in this big, bold, audacious space of the Great Hall at the Met. So what I'm gonna do is show you a fairly short video that kind of gives you an overview of the commission and the installation of the work. And then I have a few more images to show and a few more things, details to fill in, and I think I'll be finished. My name's Kent Monkman. I'm a Cree artist. This is a very exciting opportunity to work with a collection of the Met because at this point in history, the Met is opening their doors to artists from different ethnicities and perspectives to be able to reflect, at least as an indigenous person, what this colonial history has meant to us as an artist. I wanted to bring indigenous experience into this canon of art history. My inspiration comes from a variety of different sources. I'll be looking at old paintings. I'll be thinking about contemporary experiences. I love the language of painting. How does a painter describe grief? How does a painter describe ecstasy? How do they describe human emotion? I really believe in the power of painting. And through the collaboration with my assistants, we developed a process to create compositions from the initial pencil sketch. We start to identify who the characters are. We then moved into a photography stage. We brought models in and created a photo shoot. We then moved to canvas. And then eventually it's just me left on the canvas by myself. That's when I really pull everything all together. And something that I've been looking at in my art practice for many years are the paintings or sculptures made by the settler artists who were looking at indigenous people. And it's always this romantic view of the vanishing race. In fact, we're very much alive. My work really is refuting those themes of disappearance. There's elements of camp in my work. There's elements of indigenous history. When I created Miss Chief Eagle Testicle, I wanted an artistic persona that could travel through time to reverse the gaze and look back at European settlers that could really speak to creed values. We had our own ideas of gender and sexuality that didn't fit the male-female binary. Miss Chief is a legendary being. She really embodies a sense of humor, a playfulness, a relationship to mythologies and history. We have a lot of humor in our stories. And Miss Chief allows me to bring the humor even through some very dark chapters of our experience. Looking at the Immanuel Leitze painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, he's the hero of that painting. And I wanted Miss Chief to be the hero of my two paintings. I wanted to make a monumental painting that really reflected on indigenous perspective to give it that same importance. The title of this exhibition is Miss the Goswok, the Wooden Boat People, which is a Korean word to describe when the French arrived. They arrived in wooden boats. The two paintings together really speak about the arrivals and migrations and displacements of people around the world. And the Great Hall is this place of people entering and people leaving. The left painting, welcoming the newcomers, Miss Chief is literally bending over to assist people arriving to North America. That has to do with generosity. In the second painting, Resurgence of the People, Miss Chief is commanding this boat, which looks a lot like a migrant vessel. And many people across the world are being displaced from their own lands. Miss Chief is leading this resurgence of the people to represent a return to our languages and a return to our traditions. I love the capacity for painting to tell a story. I've always been drawn to history painting because so many indigenous experiences were never portrayed. This was an opportunity to engage with this master narrative to reflect on it and to offer perspectives that come from the outside. So there's an installation view and I'm gonna be very mindful of time because we're gonna have a chat and I think a few questions. So I just wanna flip through a few. And also I realized that these slides can be used as a reference for the chat. So maybe we'll go through them quickly and then we can maybe refer back to them if they're useful. But I just have to show you some of the details because they're amazing. So that's welcoming the newcomers. If it looks crowded on this slip of island, it is very purposeful as everything about Kent's work is because he's pushing it back against these 19th century images of North American landscape as if it's completely empty and just waiting there to be filled. So he's purposely painting it so it looks a little crowded just to give you a sense of references to the collection he spent a day going through. Of course he had been to them at many times but not with this purpose necessarily in mind. The Adonis is a hunter and hunting plays a major part of the economy of this moment depicted on the left. That's the Neches by Delacroix which is one of those romantic stories of the demise of the people. What the story here is that the mother here is given birth to a child that is in the midst of dying because the mother is so saturated with grief over the inevitable demise of her people that her milk will not sustain her child. It gets really, it's rough. But Kent takes those narratives and asserts their life, their vibrancy. I'm gonna just focus on a couple of details and then probably wrap up and move on so we can chat, but I learned so much in this. I can think it's one of the reasons that we do art history and cultural studies generally. It's just to keep on learning and I learned a lot and I wondered why this woman in the foreground was so prominent and I asked Kent finally, you know, what is, she's low relative to the other figures, she's obviously nude. There was concern early on about the nudity in this panel which luckily hasn't been a huge issue but she's very vulnerable and I was like, Kent, what is going on there? So what I learned was that Louis XIV exported between 800 and 900 young women from France to New France and in an effort to bolster the population of New France. So it was a clear tactic of colonization and a very successful one. And there's the Canadian, French Canadians especially have a word for, so she personifies what is known as a king's girl, a fielderoi and pardon my French, which is a reference to this corbe in the collection on view. And there's much more to say but I just, let's just for the time being, luxuriate and just the spectacular aesthetics of these detailed and rich works. And we can back up to them in the context of the chat. That is I think Kent's godson who's like falling over backwards there. And so everyone in that raft is based on a likeness of somebody in Kent's life and many of them were at the opening. So if you're interested to learn more than what I have the time to display here to chat about later, there are resources online of the landing page of the Met's exhibition page including this long narrative blog that really digs into his sources and his rationale for the selection he made. And I mean it's just been super gratifying. I mean this was a little bit of a risk and Kent is not part of the New York art world ecosystem. He might be now, I don't know, but it was out of the box for us and the payoff has been great and they get tons of love in social media which I've been tracking like a hawk. So there's just some excerpts of that. So with that I think I'm gonna close up here and we can chat for a few minutes. Let's hold on to this. Okay, just so that we can see the audience now. Okay, good, welcome everybody. What's in this cup? Okay, water. Oh, water. Okay. All right. Let me take a moment to introduce our panelists to join us for the conversation. Our colleague, Carrie McWeber. Carrie has over 25 years of experience working in museums and galleries. Carrie spent a decade working in fine art galleries in New York City, notably serving as director of the Susan Sheehan Incorporated and Edward Tyler Neham Fine Art. She was an integral, she was integral to the creation of the Fairfield University Art Museum, assisting Dr. Jill Dupy, the founding director in developing exhibitions, programming and setting up the collections management systems and creating policies. This was just starting an entire museum from scratch as we have up in Bellarmine Hall, the Fairfield University Art Museum. She was appointed the Frank and Clara Menditz executive director of the Fairfield University Art Museum just over a year ago. Carrie also currently serves as the president of the Connecticut Art Trail. It's great. You should look into that Connecticut Art Trail. It's online, right? It's online. It takes you around to the Florence Griswold and up to the Wadsworth and over to New Britain. Very, very valuable, especially when you have visitors from all over the country or anyone, they want to see the Connecticut Art Trail, a nationally recognized partnership between 22 world-class museums and historic sites which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with a group exhibition at the Wadsworth. So let's please welcome my colleague, Carrie Weber. Carrie, thank you. Okay, well, that was quite a tour through history and taking us back and forth. Carrie, why don't I let you jump in? Well, my first question isn't about this, but we can come back to this. We can back up. No, I just, I'm, you know, because I have spent 10 years now working in an academic art museum, I am just curious to know how your experience is at the Spencer and at Amherst, at the Meade, how those have colored the work that you do at the Met. If it has, are there things that you brought with you from that experience that have been impactful? Yeah, I mean, I used to say that I came out of a, well, I came out of a liberal arts college and early on got interested in museum work in academic art museum contexts. So that was my trajectory. And so this feels very familiar to me, I have to say, although I didn't have quite so many museums around me in Northwest Kansas as you all have around you. But, and for sure, I mean, I think outreach and education are important to me because I didn't realize this was gonna be about me. But I will say that I think one of the reasons I have a passion for that is that I, and this commission is especially meaningful, is that art really opened my world in ways that would never have happened otherwise. I mean, I'm a farm kid from Northwest Kansas and I was very lucky to encounter teachers and art professors along the way that just kept kind of like doing this, which I'm sure both of you do every day. So I just, that's the opportunity to say I really appreciate all the work you do here and you probably, there's no way to know the full impact that you have on students' lives. And yeah, so, and I would just say too, because I'm more comfortable talking about the art, that it's, I think one of the reasons I really became interested in Kent is because Kent, his work overflows with his kind of humanism and desire to communicate and to educate in a way that's so visually sumptuous. And so I just felt like that's where there was a great synergy. Yeah, I think that looking at Kent Monkman's work, it's very evident from looking at the film and the details is to a contemporary audience, let's face it, this is a real tour de force of painting. That is, there are very few people who can paint in that manner, in that grand, sort of the grand style of the French Academy. So that in and of itself makes it something startling. And I'll add a detail there too, which I find it irresistible and it's also one of the reasons I was so taken with his work is that, as you would expect, he has an early training in illustration, but he, as he became an art student, kind of swallowed the Kool-Aid, I guess about that abstraction was really pure painting and true painting until he had a grandmother, his maternal grandmother I think, late in her life before her death started talking freely about her experience in one of the residents, I don't know if you're familiar with the residential school system in Canada, but it's a state-sponsored religious school system, which was basically put in place to civilize the savages and Kent's Cree grandmother grew up and was educated in one of the Canadian residential schools and it's a huge national reckoning even today to the degree I did not understand and Kent found his life purpose as an artist is to try to reclaim all those stories and narratives and traditions, but using the language, the authoritative language of European American history painting to tell them. So I just find that super, I'm persuaded by it. And how did you get to choose what the commission for the Great Hall would be? I mean, did people, I'm always curious how these things evolve. So was there a all-staff meeting and everyone gets to propose something or, you know? Well, so when we learned about a new spate of commissions, our departmental team of modern contemporary curators, and again, keeping in mind, I'm usually around Stieglitz and O'Keeffe, but I had this particular interest and awareness of Kent as a bit of anomaly and our department head basically said, okay, let's start talking about who does, artists you know who would do great work in the facade and the Great Hall and there'll be other kind of interventions coming up, too, although I'm taking a break for a while. But so we just made our pitches and, you know, people have said, well, oh, well, the Met is, the Met just put, and it finally has Native American art in the American Wing. So to some extent, Kent's commission made sense to also like that exhibition I mentioned to show indigenous art as alive and well in 2019, 2020, but I was really, as much, for me, it was as much about his aesthetics in that space as much as it was about him being in, or equally, you know, together. So, but there was a, and then we, we solicited designs from the artists, from the studio, and we actually, there was a little bit of negotiation about that because the early designs didn't really engage with our collection to the degree, which was also one of the reasons that we really wanted to work with him because one of the ways the Met has sort of distinguished its contemporary program from MoMAs and the Whitney's is that we have tended to gravitate to contemporary artists who are engaged in art history because we have the historic collections to give that context. That's not always the case, but we're especially predisposed to artists who, Carrie James Marshall, for instance, is also, in a way, parallel to this. So the initial designs he proposed weren't really digging into our collections and suffice to say he went for it after. In ways that I wasn't, I didn't really take the time to dig into too much, but then we're like, yeah, that's what we want. Carrie, do you have another question? Good? Yes. All right. So just looping back with the Academic Art Museum thing with the, this commission feels very brave for the Met. I feel like one of the benefits of working in an academic setting is that we really have the freedom to exhibit pretty much whatever we want. We don't even have a board that we have to run anything by. Really? Wow. That sounds nice. Yeah. Tell me more. Did, once you got the drawings, did it then have to pass who had to have? My department head and the director had to bless it. Just the two of them? Yeah, the trustees didn't really know what was coming. And have they been happy? Yes, I think especially after Holland Cotter's review came out in the New York Times. Yeah. I also did breathe a sigh of relief there. The only part that did cause some consternation, which calmed down kind of quickly, was that you can't quite see here, but in the resurgence of the people in the upper left-hand corner, there's a group of scary-looking white nationalists, one of whom is making that now famous white power hand gesture. And that was a detail that I think a few of the folks in the executive offices didn't see coming. And to be honest, I think that there were a few details added kind of late in the process. I mean, Kent is a politically engaged artist. If we didn't want some reference to our headlines, then we shouldn't have gone down that road. So, but suffice to say, we, I think there were a couple of meetings that I was not invited to, but I became aware of, and it came out well. And to be honest, it's like the publicity around it has been so, I mean, I think in the grand scheme of things, and that has gotten praise for actually doing something kind of bold. I mean, I think that there have been a few complaints registered at the desk, but the majority has been so... And it's just, I have to say again, I made a little bit of a joke about the social media, but there's so many comments of indigenous people, people of color who are so, they're seeing themselves in this symbolic space for the first time. And I have to say, it's super powerful to me. And that I played a part in helping that to happen is like, I don't know how what I did to deserve it, and it was also a case of just excellent timing. So let me ask, Randy, you walk through the 20th century into the 19th century, here is the statement of the International Council of Museums in 2007, 13 years ago, what is a museum? This was 13 years ago, a museum is a nonprofit, a permanent institution in the service of society. And here is the 2019 definition of the International Council of Museums, representing 119 countries, a kind of United Nations of Museums. The museum today should be democratizing, inclusive, and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the past and the future. It includes human dignity, social justice, global equality, and planetary well-being. So, Dr. That was not approved. Oh, it was not approved. Oh, all right, thank you. That caused a lot of controversy. All right, well, they're still talking about it. Let's embrace the controversy. So, give us, at the highest levels, when you're at your staff meetings, when you're interfacing with the board. So, while this is, there are so many layers of the, as you say, the humanism, the humanity of this, is the museum becoming a politicized environment? Well, I mean, I think you can make the argument that museums are always a politicized environment, whether it's made explicit or not. And, you know, I'm of the mind that all of our personal lives are political, whether or not we're aware of it. You never operate outside or apart from politics. Okay. I think it's a bit naive to think that any institution or any person is, whether or not, you know, they may be aware. I mean, again, I don't think that the Met is necessarily in the business of courting controversy. I don't think that that page has turned and that we're going to, although I will say that the backdrop, there was a Canadian land rights, an Indigenous Canadian land rights organization mounted a protest in front of resurgence, using Kent's resurgence of the people as a backdrop to call attention to, again, these very, we have, of course, all of this is here too, but in Canada, the public controversies and struggles over Indigenous land rights, against part of my education. Okay, I'm going to ask you another, inside the curatorial meeting and what you have embraced and what you have at the Met, you clearly steered away from. In the, when I teach my museum studies classes and we visit museums around the state and we go out to the Mystic Seaport and we go to the Wadsworth and we go around, of course, the environment, we'll call it the intrusion of the digital environment into the museum space. Should the museum, should the museum become a sanctuary where the museum is a sort of place where you go to get away from the digital world, but how many museums now are saying, no, no, no, we need to, it's more show biz. We need terminals in every gallery. What kind of discussions are you having with your colleagues about how to keep the galleries computer free? Mm. As we see in many of the museums around the country, that they feel well we need it for the education, we need it to keep it, we need to have little terminals so that people can interpret the collection. I mean, you think at the Met, because it's partly so huge, it's so big, that we don't, we would never really have the bandwidth with regard to digital resources to do that throughout the museum. You'll see it in the exhibition exhibitions more, but the permanent galleries are kind of traditional in that sense, and I don't think that's gonna change. I mean, there might be a special feature. I mean, and I think the instances where the Met is most inclined to do that is that when we have really good conservation stories to tell, and digital platforms are really useful to getting that conservation research and information out into the public. But the digital intervention really is more often in a special exhibition. There was just this show about, it was called Making Marvels, and about these intricate machines, and not all of which are working anymore. And so there was a lot of a digital intervention into that show, and you could walk by and you heard a lot of it. Why is there so much continuous pain, public pain about the need to increase the admission ticket? This becomes a constant, constant source. Did you talk to that one? And I'm only gonna pay the one dollar, it's a public museum versus, I mean, let's think about it, a ticket without scalper prices, it's $200 maybe for a Broadway play, $300 to sit at the Met at the opera, $300 to sit in the orchestra. So for $25, somebody gets to see the greatest collection of art in the Western Hemisphere. How do people complain about that, and how do you deal with that? I'm gonna, well, we had a little chat, actually, about this right before we came up here. Change is hard. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, yeah, change is hard, there's that, change is hard, for everyone pay as you wish. I mean, this is being filmed, so yes. We're not gonna, because I do have personal opinions about it, but it's not really, it's sort of beside the point. I mean, I have to say, do feel more along the lines that you articulated, Philip, because if you're willing to pay 20 bucks for the latest Avengers movie, you're paying 18 in New York for that. What is the harm in 20 or 25 for a great collection in music? So if I have to choose, I'd fall this way. But I also, like a lot of my colleagues, the internal debates about the ticketing and the charge, yeah, I mean it's... I think the total MET budget is something like $250 million a year of which only $39 million comes from actual ticket, gate receipts, only $39 million. So to perpetuate the museum, you have to. The argument was made ultimately that if the public wants the MET to be the MET that they know the MET to be now, this is what needed to happen to sustain it because we had developed a tremendous deficit. And so to correct that and sustain the program that we wanted to do and that our audiences had come to expect, then that was the justification for the fee, which there are constituencies in school groups that are still kind of pay as you wish. I mean, I do have some mixed feelings about it, but when I look to see what other people are really happily paying for without complaint, I do think, well, there's that. And a membership is only like 110 bucks, so. It's worth it, it's worth it. Can I ask a question about the MET broyer? Oh, God, this isn't getting easier. Sorry, just, that's another question that a lot of... Explain to everyone what the MET broyer is. Now, don't assume everyone... Well, I like to say that the Fairfield University Art Museum is like the MET in that we have the Walsh Gallery and we have the Bellarmine Hall Gallery. So the MET has the MET broyer, which is the old Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue. They have the MET Fifth Avenue. They have the MET Cloisters. But the MET broyer, you gave up, not you, the museum gave up their lease three years early, I think. It was a space where I saw beautiful exhibition of Mars and Hartley as we discussed earlier that you curated. It was gorgeous in that space. That museum was built to show modern and contemporary art, that building. Can you tell us why they... I think, well, it's... Because you're building a new wing, hopefully, when you have money to do that, but that's not happening yet. So it was puzzling. I should have gotten some of these questions beforehand. Sorry. Keep it spontaneous. That's what Philippe de Montebello said. Keep it spontaneous. Wow, okay. Yeah, because I'm not around any of these tables. These decisions are being made out. Not your decisions, no. But yeah, so we are... Because subletting is what people do in New York, especially in New York, is that we will be sensibly subletting to the Frick, starting this summer. So we just opened this great Gerhard Richter show at the broyer, which is the swan song of broyer, which is sad. And I was actually at the opening last night, and there was a kind of very bittersweet feeling about it, because I love that space, as my colleagues do. It's a dream to work in. But I think, ultimately, it was about concentrating resources and with an eye to the future of coming to terms with what it's gonna take to gut renovate that wing, keeping in mind, we're hoping to... And people sometimes say that we're expanding the modern wing. There's no expansion because we're on Central Park. The footprint of that wing can't change. So we're having to expand by making more effective use of the parameters that we have to some extent. So it's not an expansion, although in footprint, but we hope that we gain more galleries, get more gallery space. So it's concentrating resources. I think, I mean, broyer wasn't cheap, isn't cheap. So there is an element of, you know, that's factored into the larger financial situation, which by all accounts has stabilized. And so we really haven't had to alter too much our program. In the midst of all of that, regrettably there were packages for staff to take for staffing. So that was not obviously a happy time, but it does feel like we're on the other side of that. Mayor de Blasio didn't wanna make it a rent-controlled building, no? I guess not. Apparently not. All right, we're gonna take some questions from all of you. So feel free, and here's a, yes, here's a question, yes? Dr. Elizo, next time for something so fantastic, you should say go and see it first. Go and see it first, thank you. I understand very much, very interesting. I would see it, but if I look at this now in this moment, I see a very baroque, wonderful, powerful architecture. And somehow my eyes tell me what about doing not the painting but the art, the ceiling, it's just square. Any Michelangelo's here for you? Commissioner, I hope I understand your question correctly. I have a sense of disturbance, also some of the images, I would like to see one that I would see, this piece going and checking, some of the figures are strange, they are marvelous render, very anatomical, but there is something else that is there. There is a political information behind it, then I don't know. Are those figures strange, I have to figure it out. But the first image that I have of the incredible museum with the little, this kind of, not even round tree, disturbing, and then I look at the square down there and then decide, I just say no, this will be there. Okay, so I'm gonna focus on your question about just sort of the placement of the commission. So the commissions for the grave, they remain on view until April 9th. And then they'll have an afterlife in some way I'm figuring out. But the commission for the Great Hall won't always have to be on these walls. Artists can do an intervention that crosses the hall that really is into the space. The commission isn't locked into the two walls that we've used here. So I think that gets to a question. Anybody else? Oh yes. I would like to raise some of the contemporary shows that are happening now, the Armory Show, the satellite shows around the Armory Week Show, things like TETHA, ATAA, and Freeze. What I think about all of those art fairs? Yeah, what do you personally think is someone who's interested in contemporary art? Which shows do you like the focus of and do you ever look to any of those shows to find artists that you'd like to work with at the museum? So thank you for that question. It's about the art fairs. And so my world does not revolve around the contemporary art fairs, whether they're in New York or elsewhere. In part because I have other colleagues, it's a department of 12 curators in modern contemporary, and I have colleagues who are focused more on living artists than I am typically. Some of those art fairs, including the Armory Show, which is closed, do focus quite a lot on early 20th century and there was an amazing cadmiss at John Boz's gallery, which I would have loved to have taken home with me. I saw it for the first time in Malcolm Ford's office. Well, that's, there's a story there, I'm sure. So, I'll leave it at that. But so I typically quite like the Armory Show because there's a lot of earlier material that I really know more about. Other fairs are really more contemporary focus that I am happy to let colleagues, I mean, we sort of divide and conquer and with regard to that phenomenon. Because he, as I mentioned at the podium that I started learning, oh, maybe I skipped this step. So I was working with someone in that context of developing that modern contemporary checklist. One, a person I was working with was really advocating for him, but the organizing curator of the exhibition of the Plains Indian art in another museum isn't crazy about Kent. And so they had locked horns over it and I always regretted that Kent didn't make that cut. But the positive in that is that, had he been prominent in that Plains Indian show in the last section, we would likely have not have considered him so seriously for this. Okay, any questions? Yes, in the back, is that Nicholas? Yes, Nicholas, our outstanding freshman. Yeah, that's a lot of- Nicholas. You must have more than one. He is an outstanding freshman. Yes, Nicholas. Do you guys see the Met going more, having more exhibits like this where you're having discussions and do you think contemporary art is going towards that direction in general? Well, I think that- Thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I think so. I mean, for a range of reasons and I think partly it's, all institutions of all size and missions are, it's a time of reckoning and really thinking about the, institutions of having a kind of authority that needs to be tending to more stories and narratives than maybe we have been. But I will say too that, I mean, this isn't isolated instance. The program at McBroyer, this in my mind to some extent flows from the program at McBroyer, which was more expansive and global and a little more politicized and focusing on artists that aren't quite so well known. Gerhard Richter is maybe an exception to that rule to some extent, but this flows from the energy that I think we created in the McBroyer and part of the point of these commissions is to bring some of that energy back to the mother ship as I call it as we dial down McBroyer, okay? Yes, ma'am. I have a question. First of all, I think this is extraordinary. Yeah, come see it. It's like in person, it's like. It's magnificent, it does stimulate so much conversation and controversy on the flip side. I'm wondering, when we talk about politics and art and everything, how do you feel about the banana with the duct tape on the wall on our page, which also stimulated much conversation? Right, the Mauritio Catalan. Catalan, yeah. It's just so frustrating when you know something like that. I mean, I don't want to, I'm not gonna comment on Catalan, which for me is a total different, that's like a different kettle of fish or something, kettle of bananas. But I will say that one of the ways in which I came to admire Kent so much is after paying it. I did, before even the commission, the possibility of the commission was announced, I was curious enough to like pay him a visit in his Toronto studio. And then I was really hooked to see his operation, to meet people he worked with. And also the most important thing is, because Kent is kind of known as a provocative artist. And this is in some cases a little tame compared to other things he's done. But it's never provocation for provocation's sake. Maybe indirectly getting to your point or question. And because his work comes out of a place of deep research. His work usually comes from prolonged research projects. He's done a bunch of work about the Lewis and Clark expedition. He did a bunch of work about the conflicts at Standing Rock, which of course deal with indigenous land issues like I mentioned earlier. So again, kind of getting back to the academic question you had earlier, it's provocative, but it's not provocation for provocation's sake. It's coming from a place of deep knowledge of his subject. And that clenched it for me. Okay, yes ma'am. The next 50 years? No, no, no, no. Retiring. You're a captive. Yeah, no, I don't, no, I just, I mean, I really loathe to philosophize and project forward because I don't, there are other people who have greater perspective on these kinds of questions than I do. I really do take it kind of day by day and tend to my work and try to do what I can do as best as I can do it. But I don't think that this moment of, oh, you know what, you remind me of something. Because I had this really wonderful, incredibly bright high school intern for a few months, well, about a year and a half ago. And in fact, I was just so convinced at some point I'm gonna be working for her rather than the other way around. And she's a brilliant young African-American woman off to college now. And she did ask me in my office, it's like because there has been, part of this larger reckoning has to do with issues of equitable representation and again, these kind of expansive stories and that we should be telling with the, these kind of, these authoritative institutions and being responsible as such. And she said, she asked me, she said, you know, somebody has said to me, this is, you know, this is all a trend. It's like, it's gonna come and go like other things. I just, I said, her name is Shania. I said, Shania, I don't think it's a trend. You know, like there's a real reckoning, there's a paradigm shift. The way art history is taught has changed, which is underpinning a lot of this. But also now there's, you know, unfortunately to some extent it does come down to money. There's money backing these initiatives, you know, endowments at the Getty Foundation, the role of the Ford Foundation in New York and beyond. You know, there's, I don't think there's really any going back. It's not that there won't be ebbs and flows and changing, but I think that we have, I mean, I'd love to hear you respond to the question to take it off me for a second. But, yeah, what would you say? I totally agree. I don't think there's any going back and I think it's a very exciting time to be using a new lens. I wanted to ask how much do you think has, at the Met, come from the energy of your new director? I mean, would this commission have happened? He, his appointment was accompanied by these new contemporary commissions. Although- Let's say his name, so they- No, Max Holine, Max Holine, who was most immediately director in San Francisco and before that in Frankfurt. And, but it's, there's a synergy that and energy in this direction that did honestly predate his arrival. My department chair, Sheena Wagstaff, who really oversaw the program at Breuer and all the work we've done, not it's only been Breuer, but it's what we've been doing in the wing and really interrogating our permanent collection galleries and I've been fortunate to play quite a lot of, quite a role in that. So it's not all about Breuer, but Breuer was sort of a lab. And then, so it's been cumulative. That's exciting. So, but Sheena and Max had to sign on to this. And again, every institution, I'm not expecting everyone to love it as much as I do or other people, but every institution is imperfect in different ways, but I honestly, I couldn't be prouder of the Met for following through with this. It's like, I still kind of can't believe that we pulled it off. Like, and not everything is gonna be this gratifying or successful by various metrics, but I'm just super proud of all of my colleagues and the higher ups who bless this. So, Randy, tell us about what it feels like from being an undergraduate at a small college in Kansas. And now I've had the privilege of being in the little Warren where Randy's office is and where his curatorial office. It's in one of those doors that you'd ever see. There's just a door in the 20th century department. And then there's a group of offices. What's it like to imagine that when you were 19 or 20, you were looking at slides on a screen and now you walk out the door of your office and the Picasso's and the Edward Hopper's are 25 feet from you. Did you not hear my comment a few minutes ago about not philosophizing, yeah. But it's an amazing experience that you, I mean, do you ever lose sight of that those paintings are right outside the door of your office? No, I will often take the scenic route back to my office, which is to say detours to see Aaron Douglas and Benton and other things. I've been taking a lot of scenic detours through the Great Hall and kind of watching people look and then read their didactic materials to help kind of unpack what's going on here in the corners, which, I guess you, oh, they're not there in this photo. I don't know, Philip, don't make me talk about this. All right, yeah, I will. No, I mean, it's just like, I will just say that, you know, like, I credit my parents who had, who never made it beyond high school and you know, this is sort of work ethic and you know, I, when I've been asked over time, you know, why weren't you a farmer like your dad and I would say, and I'm not joking, I wasn't smart enough to be a farmer and I could never have done it, I would have run our farm into the ground. I mean, it's lucky, I'm lucky that I found something else I was reasonably good at because that was not my parachute or whatever they say, that was not, you know, and I was, art opened my world, it made me care about the world in a way that I probably wouldn't have quite so much and made me curious in ways that I know I wasn't at a certain point growing up and you know, and I just love being in a position, especially with the audience that we have at the Met to like facilitate those experiences for other people. I mean, it's, I'm, you know. Okay, well we're gonna let you, we're gonna let you. I can't believe you gave me only water here. Okay. All right, folks, we're going to adjourn. I wanna again thank all of you for coming out and to my colleague, Carrie Weber and all of you for being part of a great conversation. I think that you have given us a real sense of Randy of the Met, its trajectory, the ins and outs, the opportunities, the misses and the triumphs. We're deeply appreciative and let's give a big round of applause. Thank you, Randy. Thank you. Thank you.