Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden
Encyclopedia
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
. The Roof Garden offers "breathtaking" views of Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
and the Manhattan skyline. The garden is the gift of philanthropists Iris and B. Gerald Cantor
B. Gerald Cantor
Bernard Gerald Cantor was the founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald and an important philanthropist supporting visual arts institutions in the United States...
, founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald. The Garden was opened to the public on August 1, 1987.
Exhibitions
Every summer since 1998 the roof garden has hosted a single-artist exhibition. The artists have been:Ellsworth KellyEllsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
(1998), Magdalena Abakanowicz
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Magdalena Abakanowicz is a Polish sculptor. She is notable for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium. She was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984...
(1999), David Smith
David Smith
-In sports:* Dai Smith , rugby league footballer of the 1900s, who played for Salford, and Other Nationalities* David Smith , South African Olympic sport shooter...
(2000), Joel Shapiro
Joel Shapiro
Joel Shapiro is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. Shapiro is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York. He lives and works in New York City, with a summer house on the shore of Lake Champlain, in Westport, New York...
(2001), Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
and Coosje van Bruggen
Coosje van Bruggen
Coosje van Bruggen was a sculptor, art historian, and critic. She collaborated extensively with her husband, Claes Oldenburg.-Biography:...
(2002), Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
(2003), Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy, OBE is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.-Life and career:The son of F...
(2004), Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
(2005), Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese contemporary artist and curator.-Biography:Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. Cai's work is scholarly and often politically charged...
(2006), Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
(2007), Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
(2008), Roxy Paine
Roxy Paine
Roxy Paine is an American artist. He was educated at both the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York....
(2009) and Big Bambú
Big Bambú
Big Bambú: You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop is a piece of installation art by identical twin artists Doug and Mike Starn.Big Bambú had its first installation in the artists' studio in Beacon, New York. In the summer of 2010 it was the featured exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art...
by Doug and Mike Starn
Doug and Mike Starn
Doug and Mike Starn are American artists and identical twin brothers who produce their works of art as a team.The Starn brothers grew up in New Jersey and attended School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, graduating in 1984. They continued to live in Boston until 1989, when they moved to New...
(2010).
Views
The Roof Garden offers "spectacular" views of the Manhattan skyline form a vantage point high above Central ParkCentral Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
. Some regard the breathtaking views as "the best in Manhattan." Art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
s have been known to complain that the view "distracts" from the art on exhibition. New York Times art critic Ken Johnson
Ken Johnson (art critic)
Ken Johnson is an American art critic who lives in New York. Johnson is a writer for the arts pages of The New York Times, where he covers gallery and museum exhibits....
complains that the "breathtaking, panoramic views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline" creates "an inhospitable site for sculpture" that "discourages careful, contemplative looking." Writer Mindy Aloff
Mindy Aloff
Mindy Aloff is an American editor, journalist, essayist, and dance critic.-Life:She was educated at Philadelphia High School for Girls, and graduated from Vassar College, and University at Buffalo, The State University of New York with an M.A.She married the poet Martin Steven Cohen, in 1968; they...
describes the Roof Garden as "the loveliest airborne space I know of in New York."
Cafe
The cafe and bar are popular for romantic summer dates. New York magazineNew York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
rates the Roof Garden as "one of the finest pick-up spots in Manhattan."
The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
describes the cafe as a place "to sit and drink (with) views that mesmerize, while being shaded from the sun."