The Metropolitan Museum of Art today announced the release of the limited edition “The Met” T-shirt, which features a graphic remix of the Museum’s iconic logo, the work of Miguel Luciano, artist-in-residence of the Met’s Civic Practice Collaboration. Luciano transformed the logo into “El Met” as a way to reimagine the museum from the perspective of the Spanish-speaking public and created the “El Met” T-shirt as a provocation to increase the visibility of Latino art in the institution and inspire Latino art acquisition, future exhibition opportunities and more sustainable relationships with Latino communities. The T-shirt is now available exclusively in The Met Store, and all proceeds from sales of “The Met” products will be used to directly support the acquisition of Latino art at the Museum.
As part of a three-year residency at The Met, Miguel Luciano (born in Puerto Rico, 1972) has explored the historical connections between the Museum and the East Harlem community, interacting deeply with the collection and researching the 1973 exhibition The Artistic Heritage of Puerto Rico: From the Pre-Columbian Period tothe Present, which was a collaboration with El Museo del Barrio and continues to be the largest exhibition of Puerto Rican art ever held in an American museum to date. Luciano’s residency will culminate in a temporary exhibition in East Harlem, to open in late July, which will feature works by Luciano produced during his residency at The Met.
The Met Civic Practice Collaboration Artist Residency is made possible by the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust.
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“Luciano’s ‘The Met’ T-shirt is both a nuisance and an invitation,” said Heidi Holder, Director of Education Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose. “It prompts us to examine the historical connections between The Met and the Latinx communities as we strive to strengthen the relationship between the Museum and the Latinx community, its art and culture. Luciano will end this three-year residency with an amazing track record of artistic production, events and conversations. ‘The Met’ is exactly the kind of complexity that the resident artists of the Civic Practice Collaboration engage with as we look for innovative ways to connect new and existing communities with The Met.”
“‘The Met’ is what we call ‘The Met’ in Spanglish and is the way Latino audiences throughout New York City and elsewhere use to colloquially describe the Museum as a destination,” Luciano said. “As artist-in-residence of the Civic Practice Collaboration, one of the first things I explored was the history of performing Puerto Rican and Latinx artists at the Museum, asking myself a fundamental question: Where do we see ourselves represented at The Met? Given the underrepresentation of Latinx artists in the collection, I created this limited edition ‘El Met’ T-shirt as an invitation to the Museum and its benefactors to make more significant investments in the art and culture of Latino communities, as well as as a way to commemorate The Met’s Latinx audience.”
The “The Met” T-shirt will be available at The Met Store locations —The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters—as well as on our website.
About Miguel Luciano
Luciano is a multimedia visual artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in exhibitions held at the Mercosur Biennial, Brazil; La Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris; the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City; the Poli/Gráfica Triennial of San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Award for Painters and Sculptors, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the A Blade of Grass Socially Engaged Art Fellowship. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, The Barrio Museum, the Newark Museum and the Puerto Rico Museum of Art. Luciano is on the faculty of the New York School of Visual Arts (SVA) and the Yale University School of Art. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Florida.
About The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and funders as well as prominent artists and thinkers of the time—who wanted to create a museum with which to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met presents tens of thousands of objects spanning 5000 years of art from around the world for everyone to know and enjoy. The Museum has two iconic venues in New York City: The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also participate in the Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a repository of exceptional and beautiful objects. Art comes to life every day in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing new ideas and making unexpected connections across time and between cultures.
About The Met Department of Education
Dedicated to making art accessible to all people, regardless of background, skill, age orThe Met experience, The Met’s Department of Education is central to the Museum’s mission and currently hosts more than 29,000 educational events and programs throughout the year. These programs include workshops, art creation experiences, specialized guided tours, support scholarships for leading scholars and researchers, internships for high school and college students that promote professional accessibility and diversity, programs for K-12 educators that train teachers to integrate art into common subjects, and school visits and programs that inspire deep learning and lasting relationships with art. The Met’s Civic Practice Collaboration was launched in 2017 and is a collaborative residency program for artists socially engaged in their practice, who will implement creative projects in their neighborhoods throughout New York City. For the inaugural Civic Practice Collaboration program, The Met invited two dynamic featured artists: choreographer and performance artist Rashida Bumbray, who works at Bedford-Stuyvesant, and multimedia visual artist Miguel Luciano, who works in East Harlem. In 2020, The Met welcomed three additional artists to this program: Jon Gray, from the art and culinary collective Ghetto Gastro; Mei Lum, of the W.O.W. Project, an arts and community organizing space in Manhattan’s Chinatown; and musician and composer Toshi Reagon.
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