Met
x = independently organized TED event

Theme: The In-Between

This event occurred on
September 26, 2015
9:30am - 6:00pm EDT
(UTC -4hrs)
New York, New York
United States

A daylong celebration of what isn’t. Yet.

Hosted by Thomas P. Campbell, Met Director and CEO

Marcel Breuer's architectural masterpiece at 75th and Madison becomes The Met Breuer on September 1, 2015. The transitional raw space of the building provides the backdrop for an unprecedented daylong celebration of gray areas and liminal spaces. From buildings in transition to lives in flux, ties that bind to connections that go unnoticed, singular stories from artists, writers, scientists, performers, and Met curators are presented in the signature full-throttle TED style.

1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York, 10028
United States
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Speakers

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Talujon

The percussion ensemble Talujon has been one of the most significant players on the contemporary percussion scene, responsible for the creation of dozens of new works, including Dark Full Ride, the piece that opens TEDxMET: The In-Between, which was commissioned from composer Julia Wolfe. Talujon is affiliated with the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, CUNY. Joining Talujon in this performances are special guests Bill Solomon and Dominic Donato and members of the percussion studio at the Aaron Copland School of Music.

The Civilians

The Civilians is the first-ever theater company in residence at The Met. The company’s mission: creating new theater from creative investigations into the most vital questions of the present; advancing theater as an engine of artistic innovation; and strengthening the connections between theater and society. Since its founding in 2001, the Obie Award-winning company has performed at numerous venues including the Public Theater, Vineyard Theatre, BAM Next Wave Festival, Barrow Street Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the TED Conference. At the Met Museum, The Civilians created theater works for and performed in the Petrie Court, The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing, and the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.

Amar Ramasar

New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Amar Ramasar was born in the Bronx. He began his studies at the School of American Ballet, the official school of New York City Ballet, in 1993, and also studied at the American Ballet Theatre Summer Program and The Rock School of Pennsylvania Ballet. In July 2000 Ramasar became an apprentice with New York City Ballet and a year later joined the company as a member of the corps de ballet. In 2006 he was promoted to soloist and in October 2009 was named Principal Dancer. For this performance, Amar Ramasar was accompanied Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (mezzo-soprano), Alexandrina Boyanova (violin), and Stephanie Block (viola).

Bryan Bedford

Fourteen-year-old Bryan Bedford has been playing piano since he was five years old. From kindergarten through the eighth grade, he was a student at New York City’s Special Music School, a public school for musically gifted children. This fall he begins studying voice at the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. In addition to playing the piano and singing, Bedford’s hobbies include reading, writing, and soccer.

Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey began his career as an artist in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that was later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had exhibitions worldwide, at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bey’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the U.S. and abroad, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Honors over his long career include the Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Doug Eklund

Doug Eklund began his career at The Met in 1994, cataloguing the archive of the legendary photographer Walker Evans, whose iconic images documented ordinary American life from the Great Depression to the 1970s. Since the late 1990s he has been the curator responsible for contemporary photography and related media (film/video/new media). Eklund was the curator behind the groundbreaking 2009 exhibition and publication, The Pictures Generation, 1974–84. He has also contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, including essays on John Baldessari and Piotr Uklanski, among many others.

Ian Alteveer

Ian Alteveer is Associate Curator in The Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, where he recently organized The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe. He also curated the first two site-specific commissions for the Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden—Dan Graham with Günther Vogt, and Imran Qureshi—as well as the installation of William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time. Alteveer was part of the curatorial team for The Met’s Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, which traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He also worked on the Museum’s presentations of Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings, Richard Serra Drawing, and John Baldessari: Pure Beauty.

Isabella Rossellini

Actress and model Isabella Rossellini recently wrote, directed, and starred in a series of short films, Green Porno, about the reproducing habits of various bugs and animals. Green Porno premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, ran as a Sundance Channel series, and was adapted for stage in her one-woman show in 2014. As a model, Rossellini has appeared on the cover of numerous magazines; portraits of her by many of the world’s leading photographers are documented in her art book Looking at Me. Rossellini’s film credits include White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. She has been honored by the George Eastman House for her work in preserving the films of her parents, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of thirteen books, is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University. She also serves as the national co-chair of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, the media advocacy group for LGBT people worldwide. She has been a contributor to the op-ed page of The New York Times since 2007; in 2013 she became Contributing Opinion Writer for the page. Boylan also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. She lives in New York City and in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her wife, Deedie, and her two sons, Zach and Sean.

Jerry Strauss

Jerry Strauss has been at The Met since 2009 and is currently Senior Manager of Enterprise Applications in the Information Technology Department. An integral part of The Met’s IT leadership team, he plays a key role in the strategy to harmonize systems across the Museum’s departments and is also responsible for analysis of business systems applications. Strauss has worked at Chanel, J. Crew, and YSL, and was also a management consultant for Accenture, the world’s largest consulting firm. He loves music and has a keen interest in fine art, with a passion for the works of Alice Neel.

Jonathan Rose

Jonathan Rose is the founder and president of Jonathan Rose Companies LLC, a multi-disciplinary real estate development, planning, and investment firm, which has successfully completed more than $1.5 billion of work. He is a thought leader in the community development field, advancing thinking and solutions around the integrated issues of the environment, affordable housing, community education, health, and opportunity. He and his wife, Diana Calthorpe Rose, are also the co-founders of the non-profit Garrison Institute. Rose’s book on resilient cities, The Well Tempered City, will be published by Harper Collins in the spring of 2016. For this performance, Jonathan Rose was joined by Tanya Bannister.

Julia Wolfe

American composer Julia Wolfe won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in music for the monumental oratorio Anthracite Fields. She draws inspiration from folk, classical, and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them. Her interest in folk traditions is heard in her evening-length art ballad Steel Hammer as well as in works like her percussion concerto riSE and fLY. Her music has been heard at venues worldwide and recorded on Cantaloupe Music, Universal, and Sony Classical. Wolfe is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. With a blue dress on was inspired by a plaintive field recording of a woman singing “Pretty little girl with a blue dress on.” In this performance, Sarah Goldfeather has recorded all of the violin parts to accompany her live playing.

Ken Applebaum

Ken Applebaum's association with The Met began in 1979 when his father brought him to the Museum, at age three, for art lessons. That affiliation was formalized in 2008 when he was hired as a security officer. His scrimshaw-on-vinyl-cattoy piece, "The Word Made Plush," appeared in the 2014 Met Employee Art Show. When he is not protecting The Met's collection, he publishes comics under the "License Farm" banner, produces the Octarine series of chipmusic concerts, and writes for a handful of blogs, including the pertinent and impertinent "F*** Yeah, Voltron!!!!!" on Tumblr.

Kim Benzel

Kim Benzel is Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Met. Since coming to The Met in 1990 she has worked on numerous exhibitions and related publications including The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre; Assyrian Origins: Discoveries at Ashur on the Tigris, Antiquities in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin; Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum; Ancient Art from the Shumei Family Collection; Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.; Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul; and Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. She has also published numerous articles and essays on the jewelry arts of the ancient Near East. Benzel has participated in several archaeological excavations, primarily at sites in Syria.

Ricky Jackson

Ricky Jackson grew up in Cleveland and as a young child spent countless hours wandering through the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1975, at nineteen years old, he was convicted and sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. He was within a month of his execution date when his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Jackson spent almost his entire adult life—over thirty-nine years—in state prison before he was officially exonerated in 2015 at age fifty-eight. At the time of his release, he was the longest-serving innocent man in U.S. history.

Robin Goland

Robin Goland, MD leads one of the nation's most successful efforts to advance patient care, research, and education in the field of diabetes. The Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center opened in October 1998 under the direction of Dr. Goland and co-director Dr. Rudolph Leibel, combining premier family-centered patient care and education with world-class diabetes research programs. Today more than 1500 patients with diabetes are seen monthly. The clinical space is directly adjacent to research laboratories working on the prevention, treatment, and ultimately cure of diabetes.

Sandra Jackson-Dumont

Sandra Jackson-Dumont is the Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education at the Met. She is responsible for the vision and management of education and public programs encompassing a range of educational experiences and activities designed for a diverse cross section of audiences. Known for her ability to blur the lines between academia, popular culture, and non-traditional art-going communities, Jackson-Dumont is invested in curating experiences that foster dynamic exchanges between art/artists, past/present, public/private, and people/places.

Sharon Olds

The twelve collections published by poet Sharon Olds include Satan Says (1980), The Dead and The Living (1984), The Wellspring (1996), and Stag's Leap (2013), which won both the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot prizes. Olds was New York State Poet Laureate from 1998-2000 and is currently a professor at New York University.

Susan Fales-Hill

Susan Fales-Hill began her writing career as an apprentice on The Cosby Show. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and an article for Vogue—“My Life in Black and White,” about growing up bi-racial—has been incorporated into several university courses. Always Wear Joy, her 2003 memoir about her mother, the late actress Josephine Premice, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She published her debut novel, One Flight Up, in 2010 and her second novel, Imperfect Bliss, two years later. Fales-Hill helped launch the American Ballet Theatre’s diversity effort, Project Plié. She lives in New York with her husband, their daughter, and a large brood of handbags.

Tanya Tagaq

Inuk punk Tanya Tagaq has given her visceral, elemental performances from Canada’s Northwest Territories to Carnegie Hall. Her unique vocal expression is rooted in Inuit throat singing, but expands well beyond traditional culture to incorporate electronica, industrial, and metal influences. Tagaq has collaborated with artists ranging from opera singers to experimental DJs, and been honored with a string of Juno nominations. Her latest CD, Animism, features Michael Red, a live programmer whose wild northern field recordings often serve as her de facto backing band.

Organizing team

Limor
Tomer

Organizer

Christine
Coulson

Co-organizer