Junior Rebecca Holt enjoyed a chilly Tuesday morning out of school, strolling with others along the sidewalk, admiring the cityscape of Manhattan and the elegance of the Victorian Gothic-styled Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Met. For her, this field trip allowed her to invoke her “inner muse” and take a break from the tough bustle of academics.

“I love the Met, I love the city, and I love missing school,” she explains. “I also thought it would be inspirational to look at such an extensive collection of art.”

Students from Cinnabar, Kaleidoscope, and writing classes in Ward Melville visited the Met on October 17th to gather ideas for their current writing projects.

Prior to arriving at the Met, students received assignments to work on when the trip ended. Teachers who chaperoned the trip handed out examples of pieces from famous poets who took inspiration from art and incorporated into their own writing. These examples included “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams and “Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks” by Joyce Carol Oates. Students were asked to pick a piece of art that stuck most to them and write a piece based on it.

These writers took a full day off from school and toured the museum in small groups, stopping by the variety of exhibits that the museum offered, from ancient pottery crafted by the Sumerians, to the contemporary paintings of Paul Klee.

Rebecca’s personal favorite piece was a statue she noticed on her way to grabbing lunch. “It was an old man in extreme anguish,” she reports, “with three children grasping at his legs.”

When she visits museums on her free time, Rebecca admits that she prefers paintings over sculptures, but this one stuck out. “One of the children was holding on to the man’s legs and you could see the indent of his skin where the pressure of the child’s thumb was. The muscles of the man’s back were so intricate and defined. This meticulous statue left me awestruck.”

Overall, the trip proved to be a pleasant experience. “This trip exposed us to art so that we might be influenced to make our own through words,” Rebecca says. “It’s a beautiful thing to find ideas from someone else’s abstract thoughts. They could have lived thousands of years ago, and yet you are still touched by the emotion they poured into their craft.”