Empty Met
The Met offers a series of programs and benefits titled “EmptyMet”, which allow visitors early access to the galleries before the general public can enter. These Empty Met events require ticket purchase, which can sometimes be supplemented with a Met membership. Examples of specific Empty Met events include EmptyMet: Play It Loud and EmptyMet: Holidays.
You can find Empty Met events on The Met’s tours page.
At Hack the Met, we pioneered a new way of seeing the collection. We use storytelling and exploration techniques to quickly immerse you in the galleries and to become so engaged that the Met truly feels empty (even though it’s open to the public).
You can find these VIP tours on our new website, Museum Hack.
The Met After Hours
A few times each year, The Met After Hours program gives members access to the galleries and collection after all other visitors are required to leave the museum. Seeing The Met empty like this is a magical and grounding experience: you are literally surrounded by some of the greatest art and objects we’ve ever collected as a species.
You can find The Met After Hours experiences on this page. You may need this membership as well.
At Hack the Met, we pioneered a new way of exploring The Met After Hours. Our VIP tours start at 6pm and go late, after which we’ll share the technique for you to explore on your own and see the closest you can get to The Met After Hours. We’ve developed a special walkout technique that at the end of the night can give the “after hours” feel as you walk through the galleries with almost no other guests and with the beautiful subtle lighting that makes for a one-of-a-kind experience. The walk-out doesn’t work every time; but we’ll do our best to make sure you experience it.
You can find these VIP tours on our new website, Museum Hack.
Update: Museum Hack, Company Team Building Tours, New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco & Washington DC
In 2013 I started Hack the Met as a fun hobby. I had fallen in love with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and I wanted to share that passion with some friends. We did low-key but very unorthodox tours of the museum that combined research about the stories behind the art and some fun games and photos mixed in. Basically, we bonded over the painting and artifacts that we wished we could take home and put in our living rooms.
Within a couple of months our tours were featured on some major blogs and an influx of people were interested in taking tours with me. I hired a guide to help share the load and started charging for tickets so I could pay the guide. Soon after we rebranded as Museum Hack — I never imagined that my fun project of taking friends to the museum would grow into a real business.
Today, Museum Hack offers tickets for Renegade Tours at 6 major museums in the United States:
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City;
- The American Museum of Natural History in New York City;
- The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.;
- The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.;
- The Getty in Los Angeles;
- The De Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco; and
- The Art Institute in Chicago.
Our public tours have different themes, and include Un-Highlights, VIP Nights, Badass Bitches of the Museum, Big Gay Met, Political Scandals, Beta Tours, and sometimes limited run tours like Pokemon and the Olympics. But Museum Hack has grown to do much more than just public museum tours.
Museum Hack does company team building tours in NYC, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta & Boston. These company offsites are built from the ground up to be the best team bonding activity we can offer. Every tour includes fun activities like competitive games in the galleries, opportunities to improve communication and employee engagement exercises. The museums are a rich resource of historic team building stories and we can craft those stories to match your company’s industry, values, goals, etc. So far, companies like Google, Facebook, Etsy, KPMG, LEGO, Chipotle, Dannon, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe and hundreds of others have brought their employees on our team building tours.
Update: Museum Hack is now offering scavenger hunts of Grand Central Station via Scavboss! These hunts will be available for the public as well as private hunts and for team building.
