
LEDs and the State of the Art: A Conversation with Amy Nelson at The Met
As Design Manager, Lighting Design for New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nelson recalls early optimistic reports on LED lighting technology: endless lifetimes, vast energy savings, diminishing costs, and safer lighting for sensitive artworks. At this moment in the history of The Met, when the museum will make a full upgrade to LED, it’s also a pivotal moment in the advancement of LED technology. “Having started this major LED upgrade project ahead of the pandemic and then having had to pause, during that time a number of significant advances have been made. As frustrating as that was for us to be on hold for that period, it’s going to benefit us now.”
Dimming and optics are both improved. Both zone dimming and precise local dimming are required to meet conservation standards, as well as accommodate multimedia installations. “We now have an improved array of optics needed, particularly for rotating shows and lighting various scales of work. You know, the more versatility that we can get out of an individual fixture, the more appealing it is,” she said.
“The projected energy savings is the driving force. And because we have a world-class collection, we need state-of-the-art, museum-quality lighting to show it off.” Nelson explained that it’s become more and more challenging to source halogen lamps over the past 3 to 5 years, and their quality had been declining much earlier than that. Color is less consistent and beam angles are less reliable.
The big switch
The museum-wide LED upgrade project, both galleries and back of house, is funded by the city, working with the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), The New York Power Authority and engineers from Guth DeConzo. “The retrofit is going to save significant energy: 5 million kWh are estimated annually with the 30,000 fixtures evaluated in the galleries and public-facing areas alone. And it will reduce maintenance costs for spot relamping,” Nelson explained. “It’s a totally different way to approach budgeting and maintenance in a museum of this scale.”
Special exhibition spaces were targeted for LED upgrade first, and completed by way of an earlier energy savings award from the city. Blockbuster shows draw thousands of visitors and the new exhibits every few months were supplied with fresh boxes of halogen lamps for consistency and best quality. Nelson and her team are using these galleries to introduce many curators, conservators, and other museum stakeholders to the benefits of LED integrated fixtures.
The light-sensitive pieces hung on the wall in 2021’s Inspiring Walt Disney were particularly challenging: “The ability to dim but not lose that high-quality color rendering and keep a consistent color temperature as it dims… Even where some of the drawings we had to light at 3 to 4 fc, they’ve never seemed so vibrant. It didn’t seem like a change in the show at all. It just seemed continuous with the paintings and decorative art that could take more light.”
The Charles Ray: Figure Ground special exhibition opened in early 2022. It was a much lighter and airier show of large-scale sculptures. “We washed the walls with quality LED fixtures from LSI, and you could see the consistency of color and impressive, uniform beam spread. We never would have been able to achieve that even wall wash that with the halogen sources,” Nelson said.
“Our Winslow Homer show also opened in 2022. The paintings included a range of blues because they were mostly seascapes. Even the curators who have been studying these paintings for years were in awe at the color rendering and noticed so many details that were only just coming out.… It’s a different experience. The golds of the frames pop, and the blues were just phenomenal under the LEDs. We could all see that this is the future.”

Choosing an integrated fixture
LED replacement lamps are sometimes used as an interim solution, but, Nelson reports, the halogen lamp holders do degrade lamp life. “If cost were not a factor, I would go for the integrated fixture every time versus LED replacement lamps. You have way more control and tighter beams with integral fixtures. The throw (the intensity of the output) and beam shaping are so much better with quality integral fixtures.” And with adjustable optics plus lensing of quality integrated fixtures, beam spread and cutoff are extremely flexible.
“Dimming had been problematic for us in many locations. Particularly where we have legacy control systems in place, we were running into compatibility issues with replacement lamps at low levels,” said Nelson. She reported flicker, as well as sudden shut-offs and spikes in output. LSI has developed drivers that respond to a variety of dimming technologies. The pause in the retrofit project during the pandemic provided the space for this technology to mature. “In areas where we were once confined to a replacement lamp, we can now use the integrated fixture and benefit from all of the advancements.”
The unique three-in-one driver works basically with any system. “After extensive mock-ups with the three-in-one drivers, it’s now our standard driver for all track fixture specs. We can use them anywhere in our museum – regardless of whether they’re dimmed or switched. There’s no flicker in the various galleries that have earlier dimming systems. And it has local dimming on board the fixture, so that we can use it in galleries without dimming systems as well.”
Nelson elaborated on the flexibility of zone dimming on top of local dimming: “Let’s say we have mixed media in a gallery. We can take the whole gallery down, maybe 30% and then we can also dim locally. So where there’s a tapestry on the wall that may need to be even lower, we can dim those fixtures individually.” The newly redesigned Northern Renaissance Sculpture and Decorative Arts gallery is a great example. Nelson is able to fine tune dimming of individual fixtures on switched track. Tapestries and silk embroidery works demand less than 5 fc, while bronze and silver objects, in contrast, benefit from much higher light levels for modeling and sparkle.

Maintenance, then what’s next?
The LSI fixtures lend flexibility in this demanding environment. Nelson and her team have chosen a baseline 3000K white to use across the galleries, for consistency as patrons move through the gallery spaces.
LSI offers a robust 12 year warranty on the fixtures, a 10 year warranty on the light source, and a 5 year warranty on the driver. LSI also offers maintenance contracts, which the museum is considering. “Now that we’re going to be fully invested in this technology, what is it going to look like when they do start to fail?” Nelson pondered. She reported that the Met’s current “lamp shop” of six staffers dedicated to fixing halogen burnouts may have to retrain. “Will those jobs evolve into maintaining these LED fixtures and changing out components? Or perhaps a combination of both in-house maintenance and an LSI maintenance contract.
“We’ll likely need to have an extra stock of fixtures for occasional failures in the near future. But will we one day send all the fixtures in a gallery out to be upgraded, refurbished, or replaced?... This is a complex facility with minimal downtime.” Based on previous experience, Nelson anticipates they will begin planning for the next generation of LED and controls technologies in 5 to 7 years.