Staff shows give employees of NYC museums and galleries a chance to shine

On any given day, many of New York’s most pre-eminent institutions contain not just the works of the world’s best-known artists, but also an assortment of artists who work there — for their day jobs.

At many of the city’s museums, galleries, and auction houses, employees’ work is put on display at staff art shows. It’s a way of providing validation to employees, whose work “can often feel more hidden than that of faculty, students and even alumni,” as put by a recent announcement of Parsons School of Design’s inaugural staff art show, “Making Time.” That show is on view this Oct. 16 through Nov. 9 at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, at 66 Fifth Avenue.

“It makes you realize that people who work at museums, even if they're facility staff or they're not doing anything with art, a lot of them are artists themselves,” said Eleanor Lovinsky, who has participated for the past two years in the Whitney Museum of Art’s staff show, exhibiting sculptural pieces both years.

Her pieces have drawn on unconventional materials and media: In 2023, she said, her work involved “slides from abandoned buildings and some sort of tissue samples, and I made this sort of mobile.” Last year’s piece recycled a birdcage she found, with bits of eggshells hung inside.

She’ll be bringing work to the 2025 show as well. It’s usually held over the summer, but this year it will be Oct. 9 through Nov. 9 at Westbeth Gallery on 55 Bethune St. More than 80 staff artists are submitting their work, according to curatorial assistants Antonia Pocock and Katie Fong, organizing this year’s show.

They said staffers can submit any sort of art they’d like — a sculpture, a drawing or painting, even a performance -— so long as it fits in the space. Past shows have included work in a diverse variety of mediums, also including collages, poetry and clothing design.

Lovinsky said she sometimes struggles to find the drive to start creating art, but the staff show offers her motivation.

She added it feels good to see the institution “appreciating that people are artistic, or artists, and that’s possibly why they work at a museum.”

Midrene Lamy, the Whitney associate manager of community programs and partnerships, has previously participated in three of the institution’s staff art shows. She’s mostly shown charcoal drawings, and has submitted multiple works for consideration in the upcoming one.

She said she loves that the shows give her a reason to make art, and a deadline. And she enjoys the feeling of equality she gets looking at everyone's work up on the gallery walls at Westbeth. It reminds her of what brought her to the Whitney in the first place.

"It's Heather from Curatorial, her collages; it's Dyeemah, who's the director in education, her photography; it's Carlos the guard, his video media work," she said. "It's so nice to be able to be amongst my peers and be reminded that in the end, we're all just artists."

Earlier in her career, Lamy participated in a staff art show at the Brooklyn Museum. Although that show was closed to the public, she appreciated that it was located on-site, and the overall equalizing sentiment was the same, even with only an in-house audience.

"That was another moment where it's like, no titles were important,” Lamy said. “We were all just artists."

Best known among the city’s staff art shows is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s, which since 1935 has given its staff an opportunity to display their creative exploits every two years. The next show will be in 2026.

“Our exhibitors cover a mind-boggling range of nationality, culture, media and topic, but the show is installed in a mere six days and some very long evenings by a team including guards, technicians, curators, machinists, maintainers, designers and conservators,” said Daniel Kershaw, the Met exhibition design manager. He called it “an exhausting but thrilling adventure."

The last show, in 2024, included art by nearly 700 employees, ranging from an altar installation to a pin-covered bust to an homage to William the Hippo, the Met’s unofficial mascot. It was only the second Met staff show to ever be open to the public — previously, the shows have served simply as an opportunity for staffers to showcase their work to one another, and as a notch on their art career resumes.

The School of Visual Arts wrapped its 13th annual All-Staff Art Show displaying various media by the college’s administrative staff this June, including photos of classic New York sights (yellow cabs, the New York Botanical Garden) and ones much further afield — zines, paintings that played with the concept of pixels, multimedia masses of newspaper and plants. The New York Academy of Art this year hosted its annual staff art show for nearly two full months, from May 30 to July 27, with a charcoal-on-paper piece by the vice president of sales and marketing, an oil on canvas by an operations manager and a ballpoint pen work by a registrar.

And Pace Gallery continued a nearly quarter-century tradition of having a staff exhibition that just wrapped on Aug. 14. Entitled “In No Particular Order,” it featured more than 50 works including an untitled flameworked borosilicate glass-and-brass-wire piece, paper, paintings, films and a gif, and was accompanied by a printed zine.

The Brooklyn Museum, Queens’ Noguchi Museum, LaGuardia the “Fame” High School and Sotheby’s have also hosted staff shows in recent years; art storage company Uovo hosted one last year, Marianne Boesky Gallery hosted one this month and both Gowanus’s new PowerHouse Arts and the City of New York hosted ones in June (most of New York’s staff art shows are hosted in the summer).

Christie's show closed earlier this month. Business manager Maya Manaktala said the shows, dating back to 1984, treat the staff artist’s sales like those of any other artists — with work displayed “on the walls where, perhaps just yesterday, a Picasso hung.”

But the staff works do, typically, come with much more affordable price tags: This year’s art had lots with estimates ranging from $100 to $4,000. By contrast, the estimate range for Christie’s South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art auction next month is $40,000 to $3 million

But don’t mistake a low price tag for low value. Veteran auction correspondent Charles A. Riley II wrote in 2016 of that year’s staff show at Christie's: "After this marvelous staff show, never again will I blow by the desk attendants without wondering what they do in the studio on weekends.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this article misidentified Katie Fong.