Art & Nature Afternoon at the Met

Join Women of Culture — a community designed to connect, inspire and empower women through meaningful connection with the arts — on Saturday May 12th for a very special guided tour of not one, but two, phenomenal exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, led by Art Historian Lauren Kaplan. As we deal with climate changes today, these two exhibitions show how artists have responded to their natural environments in the past.

First, Thomas Cole’s Journey, Atlantic Crossing explores the career of Thomas Cole, who immigrated to the United States from England as a teenager. In New York, he inspired a generation of painters known as the Hudson River School, who created some of America’s earliest landscape paintings. However, while Cole had anxieties about industrialization and American imperialism, his students wholehearted embraced “Manifest Destiny.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, French painters were depicting the rise of new green spaces throughout their country. Public Parks, Private Gardens surveys France’s craze for gardening and relaxing outdoors between 1789 and 1914. Following the French Revolution, a hunger for fresh air and exotic plants reshaped France’s topography and gave rise to Impressionism. We will see how the concept of public space is a modern, democratic one, and paintings of irises and peonies reflect a new global marketplace.

After the tour, we will have the chance to grab a drink and see the Huma Bhaba exhibit on the roof (weather-permitting), and Women of Culture members are invited for an intimate dinner at Grazie Cafe.

Full Schedule:
3:45pm | Meet in the Met main lobby
4-6pm | Art & Nature tour
6pm | Optional drinks and viewing of the Huma Bhaba exhibit on the roof
(drinks at the Balcony Bar if weather is bad – not included in ticket price)

More information & ticket here: https://www.womenofculture.org/events/met