Author Talk: Christine Coulson, author of Metropolitan Stories

Christine Coulson worked at the Met for over two decades. She knows the institution inside out, especially inside, with its hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and a cafeteria that are home to the museum’s devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people—along with a few ghosts.

Written by a true museum insider through the lens of humor and magical realism, Metropolitan Stories is a surreal love letter to the Met. An ode to lives lived for art, it unfolds in a series of vignettes in which an unexpected cast of characters (including a few statues, Muses, and paintings) springs to life behind the closed doors of the museum.

Christine Coulson began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991 as a summer intern in the European Paintings Department. She returned in 1994 and, over the next 25 years, rose through the ranks of the Museum, working in the Development Office, the Director’s Office, and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. In 2019 she left the Met to write full-time.

This event concludes our Museum Month series. To know more about the Museum and the art in the book, take our Virtual Tour of the Metropolitan Museum on March 22, or check the author’s website: https://www.christinecoulson.com/art