met museum docent tours

Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More

Continue in Browser

Get hyperlocal forecasts, radar and weather alerts.

Please enter a valid zipcode.

What it takes to become a coveted Met guide

Docent positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are some of the most coveted jobs in the city.

They're also one of the hardest to get.

300 people apply every year for 30 volunteer jobs at the Met.

Most of them are not historians, but rather fans of the museum.

The application process consists of an essay and an interview.

Those accepted into the program must undergo nine months of training in art history.

"A lot of people might describe it as competitive; I would say it's a commitment. And I think there it's not a process by which people apply and we figure out who's connected to the mission enough or has a level of commitment. And I say that with all transparency because it is a huge commitment to be a guide at a museum; it's a huge commitment to be a guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," said Met Education Chair Sandra Jackson-Dumont.

Guides must also pass a test before they can give tours and then continue with periodic training while volunteering at the museum.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Latest news.

How Our Tours Work

All of our tours are private, not public. So the tour is arranged just for you and yours.

• We recommend using our online booking tool for up-to-date availability.
• Select your tour experience and set your preferred date and time.
• Our booking system will help you select the right guide from our team of art historians based on the guides' availability.
• Tell us a bit about your interests and private group. We'll customize your tour from there.
• Your confirmation will show where the guide will meet you at the museum.
• Private tours for 1 - 4 people in your group booked online* are $225 per hour (a $5 discount over tours booked via email or phone).
• All tours have a two-hour minimum.
• Additional people and/or additional time have an additional fee.
• Museum admission needs to be added for each person. This will be added during your booking.
• We'll get your tickets ahead of time for you. So you can skip the lines!

Prefer a personalized booking experience?

* For those who need a bit more service via email and phone, our pricing is $225 per hour for 1 – 4 people. Larger groups are $50 per adult, $25 per child.

Real Art Historians, not scripted actors

ART SMART's art guides are primarily graduate-level professional art historians from top universities who have their fingers on the pulse of the art world.

Instagram STREAM

Metropolitan museum of art highlights tour.

Led by an engaging art historian, our Met Museum Highlights tour hits all the right objects and spaces.

Our Metropolitan Museum Highlights Tour, Guided and Private

ART SMART’s Met Museum Highlights Tour includes a wide-ranging look at the most famous and prized objects in the museum. This itinerary is ideal for out-of-town or first time visitors that are hoping to understand just what it is that makes the Metropolitan Museum of Art so special. From the renowned Temple of Dendur to the incredible collection of European and Impressionist masterpieces, we will see the works of art that are revered by art historians – yet also the works that are iconic for the general public. Along the way, we’ll bring you through not-to-be-missed stunning areas.

What Met Highlights Might We See?

• Egyptian Temple of Dendur
• Greek and Roman Statues
• Ancient Roman Frescoes
• Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze
• John Singer Sargent’s Madame X
• Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates
• European Sculpture Hall
• Claude Monet’s Water Lilies
• Vincent van Gogh paintings
• Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm

And favorites by:

• Vincent van Gogh
• Rembrandt van Rijn
• Johannes Vermeer

Museum Details

Sunday–Thursday 10:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Friday and Saturday 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.

Admission $22 per adult, $15 per senior, and $10 per child.

Book Yours Now

2. select tour length.

3. Booking Summary

4. payment details, pricing questions.

Private tours for 1 – 4 people in your group booked online* start at $225 per hour (a 5% discount over tours booked via email or phone). All tours have a two-hour minimum. Additional people and/or additional time have an additional fee. Museum admission needs to be added for each person. This is added during your booking. We will get your tickets ahead of time for you. So you can skip the lines!

* For those who need a bit more service via email and phone, our pricing begins at $225 per hour for 1 – 4 people. Larger groups are $50 per adult, $25 per child.

Description.

Where Would You Like to Tour?

Secret stories of color tour.

‘Tis the Season Holiday Tour

The Met Museum and Frick Old Masters Tour

Feast Your Eyes Met Foodie Tour & Tasting

Custom Met Tour

Gems & Jewels Tour

Celebration of Love Wedding Tour at The Met in NYC

VIP Before-Hours Tours

Get the Full Picture

VIP Tour at The Met

Hidden Treasures Tour

A Romantic Tour at The Met

Highlights Tour

Top 10 Things You Should Know About Art Tour

A History of Western Art Tour

How to look at Art

Open Today 12 – 5 pm.

• monday CLOSED
• tuesday CLOSED
• wednesday CLOSED
• thursday 12 pm - 5 pm
• friday 12 pm - 5 pm
• saturday 12 pm - 5 pm
• sunday 12 pm - 5 pm

News Exhibitions

Docent welcomes met volunteers.

More than 180 people participated.

The Heckscher Museum offers opportunities for both In-person Private Group Tours and Virtual Group Tours.  In-person Docents are also in the Galleries on select days. Next one: May 2, 12pm  to 1pm

Spanish language translation and ASL is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

STAY CONNECTED Sign up for more art in your inbox!

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

Museums Have a Docent Problem

Inside the struggle to train a mostly white, unpaid tour guide corps to talk about race..

Palace Shaw was standing in one of the galleries in Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art when she heard something that rattled her. It was the summer of 2017, and the show on display was Nari Ward: Sun Splashed , a large retrospective of the Jamaican American artist’s work. Shaw, who had recently graduated from college, was working as a “visitor assistant”—which meant, she says, being a “mediator between the art and the visitor, but also kind of a policing role where I was enforcing museum policy.” She spent long days on her feet watching visitors stream in and out of galleries.

That June day, one of the museum’s volunteer guides was leading a tour of four school-age girls. Three of the girls were Black, says Shaw, and one was South Asian. The girls were asking the guide questions about the art, which included collages, large-scale installations, works made from found objects, and photographs, many of which dealt with racism, identity, and history. “What’s Black Power?” one of the girls inquired. The guide, an older white woman, was clearly struggling to give answers. At one point, Shaw says, she compared Afro-textured hair to different kinds of animal fur. “She knew what she was saying wasn’t quite right. But she didn’t really know how.”

It wasn’t the first time Shaw , who is Black, had witnessed a guide saying something racist, unwittingly or not. So she decided to speak to her supervisor. The response she got, she says, was along the lines of “I hear you, and we can do more training, but there isn’t that much we can do, because it’s a volunteer position.”

Over the past few years, museums have been forced to confront politics at every turn, from legacies of colonialism to the provenance of their funding. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police and subsequent protests, museums have come under renewed fire for their handling of race in exhibitions, on social media, and in the workplace .

Many museums aren’t even open to visitors right now at all due to the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean these tensions aren’t continuing to escalate, especially as institutions chart paths forward in a grim financial landscape and reevaluate their programming. Museums are in the process of confronting how they educate the public about the art on their walls—arguably the most important thing a museum can do, but also a job that often falls to unpaid employees. These volunteers were historically dubbed “docents,” though many museums have abandoned that term. The work a docent job entails varies by institution, but it is often public-facing, and can range from manning an entrance desk to leading student tours. It also tends to skew toward a certain demographic. As one museum education employee who has worked at New York’s Museum of Modern Art said, “It’s not totally this, but mostly, it’s an army of privileged old white women.”

Sign up for the Slate Culture newsletter

The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox three times a week.

Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

According to the museum employees and educators I interviewed, incidents of racial insensitivity and sometimes outright racism involving white volunteers are not uncommon. “I have personally witnessed and overheard very disparaging comments from docents, who don’t even I think realize what it is that they’re saying,” said Porchia Moore, department head and assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Florida and co-creator of the Visitors of Color project. She has also served as an independent consultant for museums including the National Gallery in D.C. and the North Carolina Museum of Art, training staff and volunteers in racial literacy and cultural competency. “There’s some tension between museums and museum professionals who increasingly want to get it right,” she said, “and a docent corps that doesn’t have the language and framework for that.”

Monica Garza, the director of education at the ICA, declined to comment on the specifics of the incident Shaw described, but said, “The entire allegation is super distressing.” “Unequivocally,” she added, “there are no different standards [for volunteers versus staffers].”

Moore advocated for a reimagination of the role of volunteer guides as paid positions, along with hiring more people of color. “Docents are one of the most vital resources for museums, but the current model literally has inequality and exclusions baked into it,” she said, noting the economic privilege inherent to committing to free labor in service of an institution, one that might entail hours of training before the volunteering even starts.

One way to help make the pool of applicants more inclusive would be to turn these positions into paying jobs; many museums, the ICA included, have paid positions who fill some similar roles. Another option is to attract students into the corps by offering credit for courses, as the Getty Museum in L.A. has done. But for most museums, cutting down on unpaid tour guides doesn’t seem feasible, particularly now. “I don’t know any museum in the world that could afford to have their staff do the breadth and depth of the tours that we do,” said Arlene Brickner, chair of the Volunteer Organization at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which may have the largest corps of volunteers of any museum in the United States; as of 2019, the Met had approximately 1,400 volunteers across several departments, of whom 400 lead tours in 11 languages. Hence the question many museums have been asking themselves: How do we better train the volunteers we already have to talk about race?

The onboarding for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts volunteer gallery instructor programs used to mention Thomas Sully’s iconic portrait of George Washington, “The Passage of the Delaware” (1819) once or twice. “It wasn’t insufficient. We had a historian come and talk about it from the perspective of the Battle of Trenton,” said Nicole Claris, who manages gallery teaching and collections training at the MFA. But in 2018, they instead had four different speakers address the painting. First, they discussed the work in the context of early 19 th century painting. Then Claris talked about it in the context of portraits of presidents and how Washington was seen in 1819. Then an educator who has written a book on slavery came to talk about a figure in the shadows of the painting: William Lee, whom Washington enslaved. Finally, a student of color who’d worked as a docent came to talk about why and how that context matters.

This approach is part of a volunteer training program that began in the fall of 2018, centered on the museum’s “Art of the Americas” collection. The program uses objects as windows into history: a locked silver box that once contained sugar, for instance, is used to tell a story that’s about silver mining but also about slavery and labor conditions in the Americas. The course is mandatory for all gallery instructors who lead tours of this collection . And since last year—when a class of mostly Black and Latinx seventh grade students was subjected to racist comments from museum staff and patrons , ultimately leading to a formal apology from the MFA—all staff members and volunteers have been required to undergo unconscious bias training.

Garza said that the ICA has also put more educational emphasis into its training program and instituted implicit-bias awareness training. “ It was several years ago that we began to see the need for more training by outside specialists to help tour guides navigate challenging content and foster dialogue,” Garza said. In the fall of 2017, the museum hired a dedicated person to oversee the training, hiring, and firing of volunteers. Since the museum has been closed due to the coronavirus, Garza said they’ve “continued to work on implicit-bias awareness and have expanded readings and discussions on racism in response to current events with our gallery volunteers.”

Ginnie Hibbard is retired, in her 70s, and has been a volunteer gallery instructor at the MFA for about a decade. During that time, the training has shifted drastically, as has her own understanding of the art. “When I took my first Art in Americas course, it was strictly history and how the MFA American collection reflected that history,” Hibbard , who is white, told me last summer. “I can say this without prejudice: It was the white male historian version worldview that you get in the textbook.”

Hibbard said that the MFA’s new curriculum has changed the way she leads tours and discusses objects, like the museum’s John Singleton Copley portrait of Samuel Adams. “Nine years ago, I would have gotten the kids involved by asking them how he was dressed or what his pose was or his expression,” she said. “It’s age-dependent, of course, but now you can get into civil rights, you can get into different ways of protesting.”

She said the new training has helped prepared her for more challenging discussions. In the museum’s Spanish Colonial gallery, there are a series of “casta” paintings, which portray the detailed racial classifications in colonial Latin America . Los Angeles Times art critic Carolina Miranda has described casta paintings as “decidedly weird territory, displaying an obsession with the races and the ways in which they mix”—but they’re also works that were sent back to Spain as a way of supposedly combating negative stereotypes about interracial marriage. Contextualizing and describing them to a group of 10 kids is difficult, but Hibbard said she now has a clear vision of what she’d do if a young child on her tour asked about them.

“I would not bring up race,” she said. “I would not bring up the differences between people in the paintings, because you’re making the assumption that the kids notice the differences. I would say that they were part of a series that show us what life was like in New Spain. They’re valuable because they show us what people wore, what the plant life was like.” She said she would probably not ask the kids if they had questions. On the other hand, she said, with older kids, she’d go into their history and context. “If I had AP Spanish students who were fluent in Spanish, I’d give them the whole spiel,” she said. “They’re old enough to understand, and they might experience racism in their own lives.”

But even this pedagogical approach isn’t clear-cut. Moore, the racial literacy consultant for museums, takes issue with the choice to omit all racial context in discussing art with young kids. “I would argue that the notion and structure of racial equity and historical thinking are concepts that need to be taught from the earliest age possible,” she said. “In fact, there is no better place to do this than the museum.”

Training is by no means a cure-all, and in recent years some in the museum world—and other workplaces—have come to question its efficacy. Though Moore has trained volunteers herself, she fundamentally believes docents need to be paid if there is any hope of change. “I recently worked with a corps of docents where most people had a winter home and a summer home,” she said. “For most museums around the country, the way the docent program is set up makes that a reality.” Palace Shaw pointed out that people of color often have to sit through training that is largely designed for a white audience. “You have to ask yourself, who is this training really for?”

Many museums are facing an even more existential crisis right now: the question of whether they will be able to reopen at all. But when and if they do, these issues will inevitably become a daily reality again, and perhaps a more pressing one at institutions that—racked by layoffs and financial woes—might rely more than ever on volunteer labor. The ICA, Garza said, is using this moment for a fundamental reimagining of its tour programs. “When we eventually start tours up again, the program will look quite different,” she said. One experiment during the closures has been assigning museum volunteers to a food distribution site that the ICA has been operating out of its seasonal gallery space in East Boston during the pandemic—an attempt at rethinking what a museum’s community role can be and what its volunteerism can look like.

Moore said she is taking some time now to think deeply about the efficacy of training as it relates to docents. “I’m reading a lot of the literature and looking at what the data says about implicit bias, about cultural competence, about racial literacy, about whether you can ‘teach’ someone these things,” she said. “I think that you can, but what I’ve seen is that [museums] make this a one-off thing. They invest in it for a year and they’re like, OK, now we have our shared language and we have our terminology and we’re good. ” She said they instead need to envision something more fundamental, a whole structural reimagination of museums that goes well beyond volunteers. “We need to use this time to think about wage equity, hierarchy of the boards, and the systemic and institutional racism in museums,” Moore said.

Shaw also believes that the problems here are much broader and deeper than questions of training. “People trust [museums] so much and trust the education they provide. … People really assume that when they come into a museum, they are encountering a truth of some kind,” she told me. “Mistakes that docents make get folded into that.” She left the ICA in 2018 and now works in media and has hosted a podcast called The Whitest Cube about race and museums. After her time working inside these institutions, she said, “I really don’t believe in museums anymore.”

Nikolai Pavlovich Riabushinskii(also Ryabushinsky, Ryabushinskiy and Riabouchinsky)

Moscow, 1876–nice, france, 1951.

Collector, patron, critic, and artist Nikolai Riabushinskii promoted the work of artists and writers in both his native Russia and Western Europe. Though his tastes were heterogeneous, ranging from non-European artworks to old master paintings, Riabushinskii’s most enduring legacy remains his founding and sponsorship of The Golden Fleece ( Zolotoe runo ), a monthly journal of Symbolist art and literature active from 1906 to 1909.

Riabushinskii was the sixth of sixteen siblings, born to Maria Stepanova and Pavel Mikhailovich Riabushinskii. His father was the scion of a wealthy family whose fortune was built on banking, as well as involvement in the paper and cotton industries. Little record exists of Nikolai Riabushinskii’s early years, though he likely attended the Moscow Practical Academy of Sciences as did a number of his siblings. Unlike two of his brothers—Vladimir, a member of the Moscow city council, and Dmitri, an aerodynamicist and correspondent to the French Academy of Sciences—Riabushinskii possessed little political or scholarly ambition. He was instead a perennial source of family embarrassment due to his widely publicized gambling debts, profligate spending, four marriages, and involvement in numerous affairs.

Nonetheless, Riabushinskii shared with his family an interest in the arts. His brother Mikhail owned works by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian painters such as Aleksander Benois and Mikhail Vrubel, as well as contemporaneous French paintings by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissaro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His brother Vladimir also collected Russian icons. For his part, Nikolai collected quite broadly, amassing modern art and old master paintings, featuring examples from the Bruegels, Lucas Cranach, and Nicolas Poussin. Many of these works were purchased from Prince Golinicheff-Koutousoff, the personal secretary to the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, and later sold at auction in New York in 1916 when Riabushinskii’s fortunes waned. As a collector, he distinguished himself from his brothers by focusing on even more recent Russian art, purchasing paintings by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larianov, as well as Symbolists such as Vrubel and Pavel Kuznetsov. Riabushinskii also commissioned a frieze from Kuznetsov for the main gallery of his lavish Neoclassical villa, Black Swan, located in Petrovsky Park, a fashionable district in northwest Moscow. The majority of Riabushinskii’s Russian paintings were lost when his villa burned in 1914, leaving the precise contents and size of his collection unknown.

In December 1905, Riabushinskii founded The Golden Fleece , a monthly journal of art and literature initially associated with Russian Symbolism and in particular, The Blue Rose, a loose group of artists that counted Kuznetsov among its members. The publication was the second arts periodical to appear in Russia and was luxuriously illustrated. Issues were printed on imported enameled and silk paper using gold and silver ink, and bound with gilded rope. With the mission of promoting Russian art abroad and introducing French art to the Russian public, The Golden Fleece initially published articles in both French and Russian and was distributed internationally in eleven major cities: Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, Charlottenburg, London, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, Constantinople, and New York. After only six issues, Riabushinskii was forced to reduce the publication’s pages and forego the French text due to his extravagant spending, as well as challenges associated with typesetting Latin letters in the Russian printing houses he employed. Despite The Golden Fleece ’s expensive subscription fee—nearly three times as much as other contemporary publications—the journal enjoyed much popularity during its forty-eight-issue run, with Riabushinskii presenting the first nine issues in 1906 to Tsar Nikolai II, who would go on to become a sponsor.

The Golden Fleece initially served as a platform for the Symbolist interest in art as a means of mystical, creative self-expression. Featuring contributions from the writers Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, and Aleksandr Blok, it was lavishly illustrated with examples of contemporary painting. As Riabushinskii became increasingly influenced by a younger generation of artists such as Goncharova and Larianov, The Golden Fleece shifted its attention to the more recent avant-garde, notably publishing translations of Vincent van Gogh’s letters, excerpts from Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa , and Henri Matisse’s “Notes d’un peintre” in its later issues.

Under the auspices of The Golden Fleece , Riabushinskii organized two major salons in 1908 and 1910, as well as an exhibition of the Blue Rose in 1907—all in Moscow. The 1908 Salon of the Golden Fleece , co-organized with Larionov, included French painting among Russian examples and stands as one of the first public exhibitions of the work of Georges Braque, Albert Gleizes, and Matisse in Russia.

In 1909, Riabushinskii attempted to solicit investment from the Moscow Palace of Arts, a modern art museum, though the project went unrealized due to financial difficulties. The final issues of The Golden Fleece appeared in 1909; when faced with bankruptcy in the following years, Riabushinskii auctioned much of his collection.

In 1914 Riabushinskii moved to Paris, where he ran an antique store located first on the Champs-Elysées and later avenue Kléber. In the 1940s he relocated his business to place Beaumarchais in Monte Carlo and also opened the Galerie “La Rose Bleue” on boulevard Maréchal Pétain in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. No longer possessing the resources to purchase the volume or quality of works he had while in Russia, the gallery in Beaulieu-sur-Mer was likely a modest enterprise. During his final years, he supplemented his income through portrait drawing and painting, art lessons, and restoring paintings and antiques. Riabushinskii died in Nice, France, in 1951.

Bowlt, John E. “Nikolai Riabushinskii: Playboy of the Eastern Art World.” Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts 142, no. 98 (December 1973):pp.486–93.

Chuchvaha, Hanna. “The Golden Fleece or Russia’s ‘Très Riches Heures.’” In Art Periodical Culture in Late Imperial Russia (1898– 1917) , pp. 117–187. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

How to cite this entry:

Mientkiewicz, Jason, “Nikolai Pavlovich (also Ryabushinsky, Ryabushinskiy and Riabouchinsky) Riabushinskii,” The Modern Art Index Project (October 2023), The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://doi.org/10.57011/UUUL3327

THE 10 BEST Moscow City Tours

City tours in moscow.

• Private Tours
• Walking Tours
• 5.0 of 5 bubbles
• 4.0 of 5 bubbles & up
• 3.0 of 5 bubbles & up
• 2.0 of 5 bubbles & up
• 3rd Transport Ring (TTK)
• District Central (TsAO)
• Garden Ring
• Good for Big Groups
• Good for Couples
• Budget-friendly
• Good for Kids
• Good for a Rainy Day
• Good for Adrenaline Seekers
• Hidden Gems
• Honeymoon spot
• Adventurous
• Things to do ranked using Tripadvisor data including reviews, ratings, photos, and popularity.

1. Moscow Private Tours

2. Moscow through the Eyes of an Engineer

3. Moscow Free Tour

4. Bridge to Moscow

5. Spanish Guide Moscow - Day Tours

6. Go Russia Travel Company

7. Privilege Tour

8. Moscow Navigator

9. Put-in Tours

10. Walks With Folks

11. Moskovskiye Gulyaki

12. Moscow Bike Tours

13. Happy Moscow Tours

14. Tour of Moscow - Day Tours

15. Kremlin Tour

16. IdeaGuide - Your Personal Guide in Moscow

17. Tsar Visit

18. Excursions in Russia

19. VikiTours

20. Moscow Greeter

21. MoscowMe

22. Gulyayem po Moskve

23. Tour Gratis Moscu

24. Tour-Moscow

25. Gorodskoi Voyazh

26. Rusiatourmoscu

27. Moscow 360

28. Express to Russia

29. Russia With Love

30. Angel Taxi - Day Tour

What travelers are saying

• Put-in Tours
• Spanish Guide Moscow - Day Tours
• Walks With Folks
• Happy Moscow Tours
• Moscow Bike Tours
• IdeaGuide - Your Personal Guide in Moscow
• Moscow Private Tours
• Tour Gratis Moscu
• Moscow Free Tour
• YourLocalGuide Moscow
• Moscow Navigator
• Moscow through the Eyes of an Engineer
• Angel Taxi - Day Tour
• Your Moscow Guide & Driver
• Excursions in Russia
• Vadim Pavlov Guide and Driver in Moscow