The Story Behind the 2025 Met Gala Narcissus Flower Centerpiece
On May 5, 2025, guests from Pharrell Williams to A$AP Rocky entered the Museum of Modern Art to a spectacular visual: a climbing tower of narcissus flowers, which extended all the way up to the ceiling like stars in a sky.
The motif of the narcissus flower came from artist Cy Gavin. While wandering the landscape outside his upstate New York studio, Gavin happened upon a field dotted with daffodils. It sparked a curiosity about the spring perennial and the inspiration for its Latin name: the Greek myth of Narcissus.
While Gavin acknowledges that there are many interpretations of the story, one thing in particular struck him as especially poignant. 'It seems that must have been the first time that he set eyes on herself,' he says. 'I became really interested in that moment of self recognition—not love necessarily, but of recognition. I think that it's very easy to not see yourself clearly because of all of the kind of selves that other people tell us we are.' He then played with the orientation of the flower. When turned at different angles, they looked like stars.
So he broke out his brushes and got to work. The result? The painting 'Untitled (Sky)'—which not only is the inspiration of this year's centerpiece, but will also be projected onto the ceiling of the Temple of Dendur during dinner at the 2025 Met Gala.
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