NYTimes: Donated Slides From the Met Get a Second Life, and Showing

Part of Martina Mrongovius’s use of old slides from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition at the Materials for the Arts gallery in Long Island City, Queens. Photo Credit: Emon Hassan for The New York Times

By James Barron
April 16, 2017

It is definitely a digital-age question: What to do with old-fashioned color slides of all-but-forgotten visits to see Grandma or department store Santas? Year after year, they lie in their boxes on a shelf, no longer looked at.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art faced the same question on a much larger scale — but without Grandma or Santa. It had thousands of 35-millimeter slides, showing everything from close-ups of Manets and Monets to wide-angle shots of the galleries. For generations, the Met maintained an image library that lent slides to art teachers who carried them to class, loaded them into a projector, aimed the projector at a screen, delivered a lecture and eventually returned the slides to the Met.

The Met had the slides digitized several years ago, prompting the “what to do with the slides now that we no longer need them” question. The Met’s answer was to give them away to Materials for the Arts, a program of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs that functions as a kind of clearinghouse.

Materials for the Arts takes in surplus items from businesses and museums, like the Met, and makes them available to arts organizations, nonprofit groups and public schools. It receives castoff displays from Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s as well as discarded sets from “Saturday Night Live,” “Orange Is the New Black” and Broadway shows that have closed.