At age 25, Emily Rafferty landed a fundraising job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the largest and most recognized museums in the world. That was 1976, and today she is the president of the museum, the first woman in that top position in its 135-year history. If, as a previous Met director once observed, the museum is the “midwife of democracy,” then Rafferty may be her one true assistant.
Its collections of more than 2 million works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture—from the glass-walled Temple of Dendur of Egypt and major Islamic art galleries to blockbuster modern…
