On May 5, 2025, guests including Pharrell Williams and A$AP Rocky entered The Metropolitan Museum of Art and were greeted with a spectacular visual: a climbing tower of narcissus flowers that extended all the way up to the ceiling like stars in the 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 himself,” 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 selves that other people tell us we are.” He then played with the orientation of the flowers. 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). Not only is it the inspiration for this year’s gala centerpiece, it will be projected onto the ceiling of the Temple of Dendur during dinner at the 2025 Met Gala.
Famed set designer Derek McLane reinterpreted the painting as the centerpiece. “The design in the Great Hall is made of narcissus flowers rising out of a central well, rising into the sky to turn into night stars and descending again onto two reflecting pools,” he says. It uses more than 7,000 suspended flowers, which were all put together by event planner Raúl Àvila. “It’s spectacular,” Àvila says of this year’s design.
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