I'm Daniel Kershaw, and my work in the Museum is designing exhibits and permanent galleries.
Doors, to me, are the key between so many different areas in the museum that normally may be oddly
disjunctive and not linked. And those abrupt transitions, I think, are part of the fun of the Met.
It's a confrontation between different kinds of art. It doesn't go down easy all the time.
I think that's part of the charm of it. One of my favorite doors
that I've chopped into the building is an odd connection between
the galleries for Oceania
and the Roman galleries. In one direction
is the solid, stone architectural ornaments of ancient
Rome, and through that doorway you see a featherweight
Kwoma ceiling made out of bark painted tiles, massive in its scale. Who knew? I didn't expect that
connection to evolve that way and it just worked out fantastically, as odd as that juxtaposition is.
Another door that I've cut into the building which I'm really enthusiastic about
is this door in the Byzantine galleries. Years ago when they moved a seven-hundred-
pound display case out of the way, what I did was to open that door up and to
reveal a space underneath it that was never meant to be seen before. It contains
grotty-looking brick and the rough underside of the Great Hall stairs. And it's a perfect spot to
show early Christian art from northern Egypt. Most of it was burial-related, and so the fact that
this crypt of a space has evolved into a gallery for crypt-based art is just perfectly wonderful.
I've always been passionate, ever since I was a little boy, with
the entrance into Perneb's tomb. One of the passageways ends in
what appears to be a standard-issue Egyptian doorway, and yet it's
solid stone, it's a fake doorway. I think only the gods were meant to
have opened that doorway, but it's a jarring end to that passageway.
To me the most interesting doors in the Museum are those that whet your appetite. I love
that monochromatic Charles Sheeler painting showing nothing, just an open door, but the
door itself is so fabulously, meticulously detailed, that space beyond is beckoning you.
Some doors just impress me by their scale, and this great photograph by Gustave
Le Gray, it's a grand-looking door in a religious structure meant to look even more
significant by arch over arch over arch. In a way that's not too dissimilar from
this beautiful Telefolip Door Board. It's about as tall as a tall person is. Hidden in the bottom
of it is a round opening symbolizing a bellybutton. And I like the idea of a doorway which is so
small that you actually have to slide horizontally through it to get into the big chamber behind it.
I think that in doors there's both the forbidding and the inviting.
Between those two instinctive reactions you get from a door
there's endless variations. I've always felt that the
most wonderful transitions that doors provide are
those which give you an element of surprise. That what's on one side of
the door is so vastly different from what's on the other side of the door.
I like the idea of completely being shocked and bewildered by what's in that transition.
The shape, the form of the doorway itself can also tell you a great deal or mislead you greatly
and those are fun games to play with, as a designer I love
to play with that. And we're in an art museum, after all.
It's wonderful where the door isn't just something that
leads you between places, but is something unto itself.
I think the transportation is really what the Met's all about.
I think that's what great art does, it serves as a doorway to something else.