Met Opera enlists art stars

Starting this fall, there's a new place to pass the time between acts at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Gallery Met, a 1,500-square-foot nonprofit exhibition space designed by local architect Lindy Roy, opened on Sept. 22 in what was once a little-used box office area on the south side of the lobby. At press time, the gallery is scheduled to be open Monday through Saturday, from 10 A.M. to 11 P.M., and from 12 to 8 P.M. on Sundays.

Last winter, newly appointed Met Opera general manager Peter Gelb recruited Dodie Kazanjian, Vogue's editor at large, to act as curator of contemporary art. For the inaugural show, "Heroines" [through May 2007], Kazanjian invited 10 artists to create paintings or collages based on characters from Met Opera productions in the 2006-07 season. The participants are Cecily Brown, George Condo, John Currin, Verne Dawson, Barnaby Furnas, Sophie von Hellermann, Makiko Kudo, Wangechi Mutu, Richard Prince and David Salle. Three artists--Kudo, Furnas and Brown--contributed recently completed projects or works already in progress; the others undertook new compositions. Many of the pieces are oil-on-canvas paintings, like Currin's portrait of a bare-shouldered woman (Helena from Richard Strauss's Die Agyptische Helena), her head thrown back in ecstasy, and Kudo's red-haired Princess Yue-yang, wearing a patterned dress and reclining in a bright blue river, inspired by Tan Dun's The First Emperor, a Met Opera world premiere.

Since Gallery Met is not a commercial venue, when the show closes, all works will be returned to the artists or to their dealers. After this initial 8-month exhibition, Kazanjian plans to curate three shows per year. Upcoming projects will not necessarily have such a direct link to concurrent operas, and will most likely include photography, video and sculpture as well as painting. Not since David Hockney designed sets for two productions in the early 1980s has the Met been so directly involved in working with contemporary visual artists. To that end, Kazanjian and Gelb hope to revive this type of artistic collaboration, though specific artists and operas have yet to be determined.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning