Keeping the Lights on at the Met Museum Is an Art in Itself

There’s a job opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And it’ll give you the opportunity to skulk around the museum’s treasures when the public isn’t there.

The catch: It requires you to not be afraid of heights. To embrace them, even.

The opening is for a head lamper. That’s right. The people who change the lights at the Met have a special name. Because at the Met, there’s the art — and then there’s the art that goes into displaying the art, and those are the lights.

The lights are an essential part of the Met experience, though many who walk through the museum’s exhibits, ranging from the artifacts of ancient civilizations to more contemporary art, don’t always notice them. There’s a small team of lighting designers who are tasked with accentuating the art, while also protecting it from the effects of both natural and artificial light: This means using special bulbs as well as casings, both around individual art pieces and the bulbs themselves.

All told, there are about four lighting designers and five lampers who oversee roughly 60,000 light fixtures. Currently, the museum, the largest in the United States, is in a state of transition. The bulbs — a mixture of halogen, fluorescent and incandescent sources — are becoming obsolete or their quality has declined. The lighting team is in the midst of converting all of the lighting to the more efficient and longer lasting LED bulbs. LED bulbs also make it easier to control individual beams of light. Roughly 30 percent of the transition has been completed so far.

The process behind properly lighting an exhibit is dependent on the type of show — an object exhibit versus a painting one, for example. For a show based on paintings, the lighting design team has to decide between washing out the walls or spotlighting individual paintings. Amy Nelson, the head of the lighting design team, said she preferred lighting objects for the challenge.

“With object shows, I just love how you have to really get to know the object,” Nelson said. “You have to approach it, from the various angles. You want to look at all the details, the form, the materiality, how the light reflects or absorbs all that. Object shows are certainly, I would say, more challenging and more satisfying.”

Every single light presents some danger to the art, so the designers and lampers are tasked with protecting the exhibits from the heat. The lighting source is always kept separate from what is called the “art envelope,” or the case that houses the art. Some lights are housed in what is called a light attic — an encased area in the ceiling that helps keep the heat away from where the art is stored. Other considerations include exposure to ultraviolet rays, which the designers battle to keep out of exhibits. And for fans of the “Ocean’s” movie franchise, the lights are turned off overnight for further protection. (This is by no means an endorsement to organize a group of cool people to steal art from the Met, no matter how slick it looks cinematically.)

Andrzej Poskrobko, 59, has been a lamper at the Met for 16 years. He gets the most work done on Wednesdays, the day when what he calls “the most beautiful museum in the world” is closed to the public. Sometimes, the job requires him to take a rig up, as high as 95 feet, to maintain the bulbs. Before joining the museum, Poskrobko worked in creating stained glass fixtures.

“Working with light is like working with paint,” Poskrobko said.

The contrast in colors for lightbulbs is not that different from noticing the contrast of colors in a painting, he added.

But before you go on a museum adventure, as in the fictional story by E.L. Konigsburg, in which an art collector, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, guides children who were hiding at the Met in exploring art, you need to make the cut.

Levent Oklu recently retired as head lamper after more than three decades at the museum. He first started as a security guard.

Oklu described a multipart exam as part of the hiring process, including a written test and an interview. But there’s a practical section.

“This is the most important part,” Oklu said. “And then if I put you on a rig that goes up 70, 80 feet, and as soon as the rig goes up and if the rig shakes and if you’re afraid, if you’re nervous, I will not hire you.”

Every single exhibit requires its own type of design and maintenance. The designers consider the source of the light, the color temperatures, the beam angles and the height of the ceilings, among several factors.

An illustrative example was the Northern Renaissance Sculpture and Decorative Arts gallery, a space previously used for storage that Nelson said took two and a half years to design. In that gallery alone, the lighting sources include boxes specifically for the stained-glass windows and internal case lighting along the walls, as well as lights for the individual objects.

For the smaller objects, the lighting is designed to get the shadows to fall either in front or behind the artifact. A shadow that comes across the face of a statue, for example, will change the audience’s perception of a piece.

One challenge for Nelson and her team is keeping expectations low for what is possible to achieve with lighting.

“I think a lot of people think we can work magic, and I like to keep that feeling alive to some extent,” Nelson said. “But there are physics involved.”

 

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