When a Museum Turns Its Gaze Inward
- Kit Louis
- Oct 23
- 2 min read
Every two years, The Metropolitan Museum of Art does something quietly human.
It opens its walls — not to the world’s most celebrated artists, but to the people who keep those walls standing.
Security guards, librarians, art handlers, teachers, technicians — more than 600 staff members — are invited to share their personal creative work in a show called Art Work: Artists Working at the Met. The title itself feels tenderly accurate: art as work, work as art, both equally part of being human.
Imani Roach.On Mourning (After Aretha, January 31, 1972); (After Mahalia, April 9, 1968), 2020. Photo by Aurola Wedman Alfaro
There’s something deeply moving about this gesture. In an institution that houses some of the greatest art ever made, it’s a reminder that creativity doesn’t only live in studios or galleries. It lives in the quiet spaces between duties — in the lunch-hour sketches, the after-hours sculptures, the poems written on bus rides home.
By turning its gaze inward, the museum becomes more than a place that displays art. It becomes a place that listens to it — nurturing the imagination of its own people and saying, your voice belongs here too.
As an art therapist, I often see how creativity blooms when people feel seen — when what they make is received with curiosity rather than judgment. The Met’s exhibition is a large-scale example of that same truth: when you make space for authentic expression, something in the collective spirit softens and expands.
What if every organisation did this in its own way?
Not necessarily a grand exhibition, but a wall, a corner, a small ritual that celebrates the unseen creative selves among us.
Because when we allow art to live alongside our work, we begin to remember what connects us — that the heart of every place is not its structure or name, but the people who quietly keep it alive.
And when those people are given room to express what’s inside them, even the walls begin to breathe differently.
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”— Pablo Picasso
Image reference:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2024, November 18–December 1). Art Work: Artists Working at The Met [Exhibition announcement]. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/art-work-artists-working-at-the-met-2024The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2022, June 17). Art Work: Artists Working at The Met – open to the public for the first time [Article]. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/art-work-artists-at-the-met The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Smithsonian Magazine. (2024, November 27). Every two years, staffers at the Met get to see their own art on the prestigious museum’s walls. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/every-two-years-staffers-at-the-met-get-to-see-their-own-art-on-the-prestigious-museums-walls-180985552/
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