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The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. The New York State Legislature granted the Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation on April 13, 1870, "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said City a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations". This legislation was supplemented later by the 1893 Act, Chapter 476, which required that its collections "shall be kept open and accessible to the public free of all charge throughout the year". The founders included businessmen and financiers, among them Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the US, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Henry Gurdon Marquand donated an important part of his collection of Old Masters paintings to the fledgling institution. The museum first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building located at 681 Fifth Avenue.

Simon D. Messing was a medical anthropologist. He was born in Frankfurt-am-Main and studied at the Raphael Hirsch school of religious and liberal studies in that city, graduating in 1938, shortly before the Nazis closed the school. In 1939, he escaped Germany with a scholarship and a student visa to study in Liverpool, England. In 1940 he immigrated to the United States, and in 1942 he was drafted into the United States army as an “enemy alien,” admitted into the scholarly Army Specialized Training Program. Simon Messing started university studies in psychology and economics, but subsequently switched to anthropology.

Messing was in the cohort of the first American anthropologists to carry out research in Africa under the auspices of the Ford Foundation; beginning in 1953 he became a pioneering fieldworker in Ethiopia. He received his PhD in 1957 for his dissertation, The Highland Plateau Amhara of Ethiopia (HRAF 1985). He continued to work in Ethiopia, publishing books and articles, and undertook academic teaching.