He’s a Security Guard at the Met. Now His Work Is Showing There.

One day in the summer of 2023, Armia Khalil, a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, noticed a visitor wandering through a gallery, clearly looking for something specific.

“Do you need help, sir?” Mr. Khalil recalls asking. “May I help you?”

It seemed like the most ordinary interaction in the world.

The man was trying to find “Flight Into Egypt,” a century-old oil painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner depicting a biblical scene, the Holy Family’s escape from King Herod’s assassins, in deep shades of blue.

“Of course, I knew it,” said Mr. Khalil. It was part of his job. But he also had a personal interest in it. He had been born and raised in Egypt and was enamored with Egyptian art and art about Egypt. “At this point, after 10 years at the Met, almost everything about Egypt, I would know. Almost!”

Mr. Khalil walked the visitor over to the painting, and they got to chatting about Egypt.

As it turned out, the visitor was not really a visitor at all. He was a Met curator, planning a big new exhibit with ancient Egypt as part of the theme. And Mr. Khalil is not just any security guard. He is also a sculptor, inspired greatly by the ancient works of his homeland.

Their chance encounter was brief — five minutes, maybe less — but it set in motion events that changed Mr. Khalil’s life in a way he never could have imagined.

To understand how Mr. Khalil, 45, ended up in just the right place at just the right time, it helps to rewind a bit — to understand how he landed a job at the Met, how he arrived in New York in the first place, how a young man from a poor family in a small village in Egypt even got to go art school.

It also helps to believe more than a little bit in luck and divine intervention.

At least that’s the way he sees it.

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Mr. Khalil’s childhood in Qulusna, Egypt, was about as far removed from life in New York City as you can imagine.

As a boy, he played near the banks of the Nile River, sculpting small figures from the clay.

“My older brother, he had a lot of artistic skills, so I would copy him,” he said.

In middle school, he won contests for drawing, and in high school, he said, “I made up my mind.” He wanted to be an artist.

But art school was expensive, and his family could not really afford the classes — or even the supplies. They pressed him: Didn’t he want to be a teacher? Or something else with a guaranteed salary? He did not.

Fortunately a cousin who was a priest in the Coptic Orthodox Church supported his dream — spiritually, emotionally and financially — and Mr. Khalil was able to go to a fine arts university in Minya, about 160 miles south of Cairo.

He already had deep affection for Egyptian history and ancient Egyptian art. But he soon fell in love with the Renaissance too. He spent hours in the library, studying paintings of swirling hair, winged angels and religious scenes. “I was really fascinated,” he said.

While at school he found work carving small religious figures — statues of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, small studies of the crucifixion and even a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” in wood.

Gradually, his family had a change of heart. “Once they saw me making some money — maybe even more than them — they were like, ‘wow,’” Mr. Khalil said. He describes the situation as “kind of a divine thing.” The work allowed him to support himself and contribute to his family.

While he studied classical oil painting, he liked the challenge of woodworking. In painting, he noted, a mistake can be covered up, painted over. With wood, he said, “once you cut, you cannot bring it back. You have to be very careful. Once I cut through the wood, that’s it.”

He dreamed of moving to the United States after school but was denied a visa. He moved to Cairo and, for a time, found work making copies of ancient Egyptian sculptures from a workshop near the pyramids.

Once or twice a week, he visited the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, absorbing and studying everything he could, especially the ancient artifacts.

“It was really cool to see the actual pieces, like 5,000 years old, 4,000 years old,” he said. “And for me, the visit was not just to admire and take a picture and leave. I was there to learn.” He made replicas of the woodworking tools the ancient Egyptians used and taught himself to use them.

In 2005, a letter he was not expecting changed everything.

After Mr. Khalil was rejected for a visa to the United States, his younger sister had reapplied on his behalf. This time, it worked: He was one of 55,000 people from around the world who were awarded an immigrant visa that year.

Mr. Khalil had never ventured outside Egypt before. But in September 2006, at 25 years old, he landed at Kennedy International Airport in New York City with about $375 in his pocket and two suitcases — one of which was full of woodworking tools.

His first few months were difficult. He was sleeping in a room in Jersey City with strangers — a friend of a friend had an available bed. He took a job mixing concrete at a construction site. It was cold. He missed his family. He cried.

But in November, he visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time.

“I still have the ticket,” he said, laughing. His first impression: Wow.

“I was face to face with all the great artists, all the masters. The impressionists. Van Gogh, Manet, Monet.” But most important, he said, “I asked them, where are the Egyptian galleries?” He went to the room that held the Tomb of Perneb and beautiful painted scenes of the afterlife and took a deep breath. “I’m in Egypt again,” he recalled feeling.

As he walked through the museum, he was inspired to call his brother back home.

“I said, ‘I’m at the Met now, in front of Caravaggio! And there is one piece of Michelangelo!’”

A security guard told him he should not be talking on the phone in the gallery, and he apologized. “I was really excited,” he said.

Over the next few years, he tried finding jobs at art galleries or art studios, without success. He briefly considered moving to Texas. “I had nothing to be sorry about, but it was really a tough time,” he said.

The city slipped into a recession, and things got harder. But Mr. Khalil persisted. “I just wanted to be close to the art world,” he said. He applied for jobs at museums all over town, repeatedly.

In 2012, six years after his arrival in New York City, Mr. Khalil got the call he had been waiting for. It was the Met. Was he interested in a security job?

A few days earlier, he had earned his U.S. citizenship. “It was a dream week,” he said. “I was really happy. For the first time since I made it here, I was really happy.” His first guard post was in the Egyptian Wing.

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When Akili Tommasino, a Brooklyn-raised, Harvard-educated Met curator, first encountered Mr. Khalil that day back in 2023, the curator was admittedly trying to keep a low profile.

“I was not wearing my ID,” Mr. Tommasino recalled. “I typically don’t wear it as I walk through the galleries — otherwise I become a bathroom monitor.”

But Mr. Khalil was curious about his interest in “Flight Into Egypt,” and Mr. Tommasino produced his staff badge. He told Mr. Khalil he was planning his third exhibition for the Met, and it would include the painting.

Mr. Khalil told Mr. Tommasino he was an artist himself and made sculptures inspired by ancient Egyptian art.

“I asked him to show me something,” Mr. Tommasino said. Mr. Khalil suggested that Mr. Tommasino pull up his Instagram account.

Mr. Tommasino was struck by what he saw: an image of Mr. Khalil inside his studio in Cairo, alongside several remarkable sculptures, including a life-size wooden figure of King Tut and full-size replica of an ancient Egyptian coffin. Mr. Khalil briefly explained how he worked, using some tools he made himself, inspired by the tools used by the artists of ancient Egypt.

Mr. Tommasino was amazed. “I just knew, based on that image, that he was talented,” he said.

Crucially, Mr. Khalil’s work tied in perfectly to the exhibit Mr. Tommasino hoped to create: one that would include contemporary Egyptian artists who use ancient Egyptian artwork as inspiration.

“I immediately invited him to participate in that exhibition and to make something for inclusion,” Mr. Tommasino said. “I had no clue what that would be.”

Mr. Khalil had an idea and a piece of wood — part of a stump — that he had found close to a park a few blocks away from his small storefront studio in Bayonne, N.J. Over the next six months, he plotted and created his sculpture.

First he made a plaster model, as a blueprint or guide. Then he started to carve the wood.

During the day, he was on his feet at the museum. In the evening, he commuted to Bayonne, taking the subway to the PATH train to the Hoboken Light Rail. Carefully, he shaped the wood with chain saws, adzes, awls and sanders.

By May of last year, he had finished. The sculpture was photographed for the exhibition’s catalog. In October, art handlers from the Met arrived at his small studio to carefully wrap the sculpture and transport it by car to the museum. “It was really official,” Mr. Khalil said.

The piece is simple, yet striking: a carved wooden bust of a female figure, about two feet tall, serene and calm. A braid snakes over her shoulder, and on her head sits a scarab beetle, the size of a palm.

The sculpture is titled “Hope — I Am a Morning Scarab.” The scarab beetle was a symbol of hope for the ancient Egyptians.

“They observed the scarab beetles, they would see them every morning, coming out of the mud, the same cycle of life, doing the same thing every day, not getting bored or tired,” Mr. Khalil said. “I love that idea.”

Before the staffers wrapped the piece, Mr. Khalil pressed his lips to the peaceful face he had sculpted.

“That was my last chance to touch her,” he said. “I kissed her goodbye. Even though I was going to see her — but in a different way.” Once the piece was in the museum, it could not be touched, not even by the artist.

The exhibit, titled “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now,” opened in November. It features works from Black artists from around the globe who were inspired by ancient Egypt, including major names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker and Aaron Douglas. It is a New York Times “Critic’s Pick,” and ArtNet called it “enthralling.” One room, “Heritage Studies,” was designed to include the perspectives of modern Egyptians. That’s where visitors can find Mr. Khalil’s sculpture.

“It was really big for me,” he said. “Like two galleries away from Van Gogh!”

It is not exciting just for Mr. Khalil. “It’s also once in a lifetime for me, as much as it is for him,” Mr. Tommasino said.

A chance encounter like theirs, he said, “does sound a little, like, magical or something.”

If Mr. Khalil hadn’t been in the gallery, if Mr. Tommasino hadn’t run into him …

“The show would have been missing a key element,” Mr. Tommasino said. “It’s a masterful sculpture that belongs in the exhibition.”

Mr. Tommasino noted that Mr. Khalil’s artwork, completed in 2024, is the newest work in the show and proof of his exhibit’s concept, that “ancient Egypt is an ongoing source of inspiration.”

“It’s one of several works in the exhibition that delivers on the promise of the ‘now’ in the subtitle of the exhibition,” Mr. Tommasino said. “That’s the major contribution that it gives to that particular gallery.”

The lesson, Mr. Tommasino said, is that curators should be open to finding art in unexpected places, from unexpected sources.

Mr. Khalil is not, it should be said, the only artist among the Met museum staff members. Every other year, the employees organize staff-only art shows to share pieces with each other. Recently, the employee show, which runs for about two weeks, was open to the public. But, a museum spokeswoman said, Mr. Khalil’s sculpture marks the first time in recent memory a current employee has had a piece in a major exhibition — a point of pride for his co-workers.

“Our entire Security Department couldn’t be more thrilled for Armia,” said Regina Lombardo, the museum’s chief security officer. “It brings us immense joy to see his artwork featured in the exhibition, which is a well-deserved recognition and a testament to his incredible talent and creativity.”

It is unclear what will happen to the statue after the exhibit ends in February. It belongs to Mr. Khalil and is on loan to the museum.

“I just wanted to make something kind of beautiful,” he said. Something that said, “Do not lose hope. And continue to hope every day.”

On a recent Friday morning, two museum visitors, women in black-framed glasses and black puffy coats, looked at the sculpture, then looked down at the exhibit label, and then back at the sculpture. The label notes that the artist is Armia Khalil, who started wood carving in Cairo and “continues to be inspired by the archaic sculptures he encounters during his work as a security officer at the Met.”

“Incredible,” one of the women said.

Moments later, on the other side of the museum, Mr. Khalil, dressed in his security guard uniform, a navy blue blazer and slacks with a bright tie, was approached by a visitor who was looking for vintage baseball cards. Smiling, he pointed the way.

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.