Met reopens with Hector Zamora's anti-Trump wall

The Met reopens with an "anti-Trump wall" on the roof terrace: Mexican artist Héctor Zamora has created the installation "Lattice Detour" which transforms the view of the Manhattan skyline using one of the symbols that define the politics of our time .
    The wall, accessible to the public from 29 August, the day of the reopening of the Met, will be open until 7 December.
    In the construction Zamora used modest materials, bricks made in Mexico, composed of Mexican earth, by local labor and with traditional processes in an act of "poetic justice" compared to what is happening on the southern border of the USA where for three and a half years Donald Trump is building the anti-immigrant wall.
    "Zamora interrupts the terrace space by inducing visitors to change the perspective of the skyline and creating a meditation on movement, transparency and interference," commented the director of the Met, Max Hollein, presenting the installation.
    The wall obstructs and filters the usual view of Central Park and the new "extra-slim" skyscrapers that have transformed the panorama south of the museum in recent years. But the purpose of the work is not exclusively to cover the view of the "green gem" of Manhattan and of what has been called "the corridor of billionaires". The bricks were mounted horizontally to show their perforations: an artistic gesture that allows light and air to pass through. The reference is to the perforated terracotta walls, common in the popular architecture of the Middle East, Africa, Spain and Latin America.
    The rooftop installation, the eighth in the history of the Met and the first in New York for 44-year-old Zamora, is one of the key moments in the reopening of the museum after more than five months of lockdown due to the Coronavirus.
    Many news for the public and many security measures adopted to prevent infections: from time-limited tickets to the closure of galleries such as the "Studiolo di Gubbio", too small to allow social distancing. Among the innovations, there will be a free secure parking service for bicycles on the north side of the square. Accesses reduced by 75 percent and profits even more: the Met that recently introduced the paid ticket for non-residents will have to settle for visitors overwhelmingly from New York given the travel restrictions imposed by the governor Andrew Cuomo to contain the pandemic.