There will be only a brief time allotted to indulge in aesthetic nostalgia, since the new Uris Center for Education opening today at the Metropolitan Museum will very soon — with its crisp grandeur, open spaces, natural light, technological tools, state-of-the-art studios, WiFi-equipped library, teacher-training rooms and 82-member educational staff — sweep away all recollection of its past.

Today’s inaugural events are scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. with a ribbon cutting to be attended by politicians, donors and others; the ceremony will be followed by a public daylong sampling of the center’s range and wares: a bazaar of arts education for all ages. These events will allow little time to dwell much on an era that came to an end three years ago, when the center was closed for this ambitious $75 million, 25,000-square-foot reconstruction.

But art education is a strange and surprising enterprise. It makes memories as important as celebration, traditions as crucial as innovation. And in itself, the new physical setting, however impressive, doesn’t guarantee anything, particularly for those who in the last two decades have shepherded their children through the Uris’s once ramshackle and cramped setting, watching them begin to feel as if the great museum above their heads was partly their own, worth exploring well into adulthood.

Read full article (New York Times, October 23, 2007)

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