25 March 2012

My Met

Because I have this never-ending love affair with The Met, I couldn't help but join the museum's newest social media campaign: My Met.  Talk about a perfect way to get people emotionally engaged.

I was just expecting to be one of the many people submitting entries without ever getting an acknowledgement; with The Met's thousands and thousands of visitors and fans, it's hard to expect anything. So you can imagine my happiness and surprise when I got a notification from The Met on Twitter just this Friday saying that my submission is the featured entry of this week!




It is really so sweet of them. They even linked my entry on their Facebook page, and I'm amazed to see that their announcement on my submission garnered 200+ likes and 40+ shares. Wow, thank youuu!! I hope the MyMet campaign spurs more people to submit.

Me being such a big starry-eyed fan of The Met, I took the opportunity to make a screen grab of my submission, which I hope stays in the museum's web archives forever! If you want to see previous MyMet submissions, click here.

What also bowled me over is that The Met has now started following me on Twitter. Oh. Wow. I'm starting to feel pressured.  Should I come up with less inane tweets about my life?

























So here's the screen grab of my featured entry. Okay, I know, 'home' must be quite boring and corny for so many, but The Met is really just that.  It's the place where I feel most at home when I'm in New York.  I've been there around 10 times, and I still feel like I can't get enough of it. There's this sense of familiarity, of belonging that washes over me whenever I step inside. Even the lamb gyro and coffee stands in front of the museum have become solid favorites of mine, because they're all part of my Met experience.

Last January, before I was set to return to Manila, I was feeling rather morose going around The Met and The Cloisters, knowing it was going to be a long while before I'd see these places again. So there I was, wandering around the galleries and desperately snapping up whatever souvenirs I could afford to get.

Seeing the MyMet campaign online made me miss my favorite NY hangout even more.  The campaign asks you to choose up to eight favorite art pieces--a difficult task, if you ask me. I have loads of favorites.  Here they are (and I'd most probably update this blog entry to add the ones I unintentionally forgot!) in no particular order.

(All the following images are from The Metropolitan Museum's website, so please don't use them for commercial purposes.)

Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses



Vincent van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat


Okay, this isn't obviously an image from The Met collection; I just had to squeeze in a photo of me looking really happy to be inside a room full of van Goghs at the Met. You can tell he's my favorite guy!


Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Ugolino and His Sons. One of my all-time favorite sculptures. It is overpoweringly huge and beautiful to look at from any angle. More people should see this; I feel that it's so underrated.  Someday, I hope to sketch this in full...

Georges de La Tour's The Fortune Teller. I love how this painting tells a very interesting story.

The Unicorn in Captivity (from The Unicorn Tapestries). I took the long journey up north to The Cloisters TWICE just to see my favorite tapestry. Seeing this and the rest of The Cloisters are always worth it.

Saw Alexander McQueen's 'Savage Beauty' Exhibit during my first ever visit to the Met. This Oyster Dress is magical. McQueen WAS magical.


Marc Chagall's The Lovers. Just like a dream. :)

Shiva as the Lord of Dance. I drew this once for a history paper on Hinduism which I had to do back in high school. I made it a point to see Shiva on my last winter visit to the Met. It was one of those full-circle moments. :P

Salvador Dali's The Accommodations of Desire. Dali's a genius. And his paintings always give me the heebie jeebies.

From A Hotel in the Cours d'Albret, Bordeaux. In the Met's European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Wing, there are rooms and rooms containing all these priceless artifacts and furniture found in the grand mansions of the European nobility. I stumbled into this wing by accident; I didn't know at first that The Met would have these kinds of sets!

Model Granary from the Tomb of Meketre. Dioramas fascinate me, and anything about Egypt is automatically interesting for me. This miniature model is so wonderfully preserved. I saw other models in the American Museum of Natural History and, if I'm lucky, I look forward to seeing more like it in the Cairo Museum.

The Temple of Dendur. Saved from destruction and carried brick by brick to US shores.


Another shameless photo plug. As you can see from this picture, the Egyptian Wing is a heavy favorite because of the Temple of Dendur.

Johannes Vermeer's Young Woman With a Water Pitcher. For some strange reason, I'm so attached to this painting. I had to see her again on my last visit to The Met. I stayed in the room where 'she' was until it was time for the museum guide to tell me that the place was closing. :(


I have so many photos taken at The Met that I'll probably upload an entire Facebook album of it one of these days.  I miss the place dreadfully.  When I visit New York again (hopefully in the next 2 or 3 years), The Met is sure to be at the top of my to-see list. After all, it's always a second home.

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