Third Tuesdays | 6 PM
July, September, November, January, March, May
The AMA Art Lovers Book Club’s next meeting is at 6 pm on Tuesday, May 21, 2024, at the Albany Museum of Art. The club will discuss All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley.
Bringley was writing for The New Yorker when his older brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Feeling the need to escape the mundane clamor of daily life, he quit his job and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the museum, he worked as a security guard. His temporary refuge became a decade-long journey, one that gave him unrestricted access to the 2 million-square-foot museum.
Published in February 2023, the book is an Amazon Best-Seller in Museum Studies & Museology. It was selected as a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, the Financial Times, Book Riot, and the Sunday Times (London).
Readers follow Bringley as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.
- July 18: Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood;
- Sept 19: All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr;
- Nov 21: Tapestry by Beth Duke; register;
- Jan 16: The Portrait Paperback by Emilia Kelly;
- March 19: Girl Reading by Katie Ward; register;
- May 21: All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley; register HERE.