Oh how we loved the Netflix 2021 American documentary series ‘Fran Lebowitz: Pretend It’s a City’. So when we received this short video in our inbox ~ ‘Fran Lebowitz: Pretend It’s a Museum’, we couldn’t wait to view and share.
Continue reading “Fran Lebowitz: Pretend It’s a Museum ~ From The Metropolitan Museum of Art”
Here’s some news that will make your Monday a whole lot sweeter. The Met’s newly acquired painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children, attributed to Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (Franco-American, Maastricht (then under French rule) 1801–1888 Paris), is now on view in Gallery 756 of the American Wing.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the exhibition Lineages: Korean Art at The Met, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Museum’s Arts of Korea gallery. The exhibition will showcase 30 objects dating from the 12th century to the present day, including works acquired by the Museum in the last 25 years, paired with important international loans of 20th-century art. Some of the objects will rotate during the run of the exhibition. Through four themes—lines, things, places, and people—the exhibition will display the history of Korean art in broad strokes. On view November 7th.
Continue reading “The Met Celebrates 25th Anniversary of Arts of Korea Gallery”
Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and André Derain (1880–1954) embarked on a creative partnership in the summer of 1905 that would change the course of French painting. The two painters daringly experimented with energetic bursts of color, form, and structure, the outcome of which led to a bold, new artistic language known as Fauvism (from the French fauve, or “wild beast”). Opening at The Met on October 13, 2023, Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism will present, for the first time in the United States, the legacy of that legendary summer through 65 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Matisse and Derain on loan from national and international museums and private collections.
The 1930s was a decade of political and social upheaval in the United States, and the art and visual culture of the time reflected the unsettled environment. Americans searched for their cultural identity during the Great Depression, a period marked by divisive politics, threats to democracy, and intensified social activism, including a powerful labor movement. Featuring more than 100 works from The Met collection and several lenders, Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s explores how artists expressed political messages and ideologies through a range of media, from paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs to film, dance, decorative arts, fashion, and ephemera. Highlights include paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis; prints by Elizabeth Olds, Dox Thrash, and Riva Helfond; photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange; footage of Martha Graham’s dance Frontier; and more. The exhibition is on view September 7 through December 10, 2023.
The Met unveiled today four new sculptures by Nairy Baghramian (German citizen, born Iran 1971) for the Museum’s facade. This is the first public installation by the artist in New York City. Baghramian’s cast aluminum polychrome sculptures feature components that seem to have washed up like flotsam and jetsam in the voids of their respective niches. These abstract forms at the threshold of the Museum present a metaphor of the institution as a filter of historical fragments deemed representative or exemplary. The project’s title Scratching the Back—a distortion of the idiom “scratch the surface”—alludes to the need to move beyond superficially constructed cultural narratives. The Facade Commission: Nairy Baghramian, Scratching the Back will be on view through May 28, 2024.
The Met will open Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn, the first exhibition dedicated to a captivating, but lesser-known chapter in the Cubist period of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). In 1910, while making radical formal experiments with the human figure that brought him to the brink of abstraction, the artist embarked on a decorative commission for the Brooklyn residence of artist, collector, and critic Hamilton Easter Field (1873–1922). While the commission ultimately went unrealized, it served as a catalyst for Picasso’s exploration of Cubism, as he worked, abandoned, and reworked the panels in various studios in France. This focused exhibition will bring together for the first time six paintings linked to the commission—a group of figure and still life compositions—along with related works and archival material. It provides a unique opportunity to view these canvases together in the same gallery and to consider them in relation to the architectural space for which they were originally intended.
Continue reading “‘Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn’ to Open at The Met Fifth Avenue”
Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 24, 2023, Manet/Degas examines one of the most significant artistic dialogues in the genesis of modern art. Born only two years apart, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) were friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists whose work shaped the development of modernist painting in France. By examining the ways in which their careers intersected and presenting their work side by side, this exhibition investigates how their artistic objectives and approaches both overlapped and diverged.
On September 9, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open the newly designed 81st Street Studio, a science and art play space for children ages 3 to 11, in the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education. The renovated 3,500-square-foot area, designed by KOKO Architecture + Design, will be an interactive space that reimagines how the Museum can inspire exploration of its encyclopedic collection, amplify curiosity, and create new experiences for The Met’s youngest visitors.
Continue reading “Discovery and Play in The Met’s New 81st Street Studio!”
In February 2024, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.
To celebrate the centennial of Richard Avedon’s birth in 1923, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a selection of the photographer’s most innovative group portraits in the exhibition Richard Avedon: MURALS, opening January 19, 2023. Although Avedon first earned his reputation as a fashion photographer in the late 1940s, his greatest achievement was his stunning reinvention of the photographic portrait. Focused on the short period between 1969 and 1971, this exhibition will explore a critical juncture in the artist’s career, when, after a hiatus from portraiture, he began working with a new camera and a new sense of scale. The exhibition will be organized around three monumental photomurals in The Met collection (the largest measures nearly 10 x 35 feet) that depict the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he transformed the conventions of the genre.
The Costume Institute’s spring 2023 exhibition will examine the work of Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019). Focusing on the designer’s stylistic vocabulary as expressed in aesthetic themes that appear time and again in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019, the show will spotlight the German-born designer’s unique working methodology. The exhibition will be on view from May 5th through July 16th, 2023.
Continue reading “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty at The Metropolitan Museum of Art”
April 8, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and thus the year will represent a celebration of his work and his artistic legacy in France, Spain and internationally. For this occasion, the French and Spanish governments have organized a large-scale transnational event through a bi-national commission, bringing together the cultural and diplomatic administrations of both countries.
Supported by renowned cultural institutions in Europe and the United States, the program of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023 will be structured around some fifty exhibitions and events that, as a whole, trace a historiographical approach to Picasso’s work.
In Europe and the United States, the exhibitions and associated programs of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023 will therefore highlight the artist’s influence throughout the 20th century and his continued reference for artists of the 21st century through a variety of approaches. 42 exhibitions are currently planned. 16 in Spain; 12 in France; 2 in Germany; 2 in Switzerland; 1 in Monaco; 1 in romania; 1 in Belgium, and we will highlight below the 7 exhibitions scheduled for here in the USA.
Below, we list where the celebratory events will be held in the New York area from May into January, 2024. As we get closer to the dates for each event, more information will be provided.
Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 2, 2023, Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 will present selections from a unique unbound album of photographs of New York City created by American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), shedding new light on the creative process of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on 32 pages, the album comprises a kind of photographic sketchbook, offering a rare glimpse of an artist’s mind at work. In addition to some 20 framed album pages, the exhibition will feature photographs from The Met collection of Paris streets by Eugène Atget, whose archive Abbott purchased and promoted; views of New York by her contemporaries Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White; and selections from Abbott’s federally funded documentary project, Changing New York (1935–39).
Continue reading “Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 to Open at The MET in March, 2023”
To celebrate the centennial of Richard Avedon’s birth in 1923, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a selection of the photographer’s most innovative group portraits in the exhibition Richard Avedon: MURALS, opening January 19, 2023. Although Avedon first earned his reputation as a fashion photographer in the late 1940s, his greatest achievement was his stunning reinvention of the photographic portrait. Focused on the short period between 1969 and 1971, this exhibition will explore a critical juncture in the artist’s career, when, after a hiatus from portraiture, he began working with a new camera and a new sense of scale. The exhibition will be organized around three monumental photomurals in The Met collection (the largest measures 10 x 35 feet) that depict groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he transformed the conventions of the genre.
The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel.
In Maya art—one of the greatest artistic traditions of the ancient Americas—the gods are depicted in all stages of life: as infants, as adults at the peak of their maturity and influence, and finally, as they age. The gods could perish, and some were born anew, providing a model of regeneration and resilience. Opening November 21, 2022, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art will bring together nearly 100 rarely seen masterpieces and recent discoveries in diverse media—from the monumental to the miniature—that depict episodes in the life cycle of the gods, from the moment of their birth to resplendent transformations as blossoming flowers or fearsome creatures of the night. Created by masters of the Classic period (A.D. 250–900) in the spectacular royal cities in the tropical forests of what is now Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, these landmark works evoke a world in which the divine, human, and natural realms are interrelated and intertwined. Lenders include major museum collections in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, and many of these works have never been exhibited in the U.S., including new discoveries from Palenque (Mexico) and El Zotz (Guatemala).
Continue reading “The Met to Present ‘Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art’ on November 21, 2022”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke has been selected to create new works for The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches, the third in a new series of site-specific commissions for the exterior of the Museum. The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt will be on view September 16, 2022 through May 22, 2023.
Continue reading “Artist Hew Locke Unveiled ‘Gilt’ ~ The Met’s 2022 Facade”
Louise Bourgeois: Paintings is the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings produced by the iconic, French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) between her arrival in New York in 1938 and her turn to sculpture in 1949. The exhibition opens on April 12th.
Continue reading “The Comprehensive Exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois: Paintings’ Opens at The Met”
Renowned for his powerful paintings of American life and scenery, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) remains a consequential figure whose art continues to appeal to broad audiences. Opening April 11, 2022, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents will reconsider the artist’s work through the lens of conflict, a theme that spans his prolific career. A persistent fascination with struggle permeates Homer’s art—from emblematic images of the Civil War and Reconstruction that examine the effects of the conflict on the landscape, soldiers, and formerly enslaved people to dramatic scenes of rescue and hunting, as well as monumental seascapes and dazzling tropical works painted throughout the Atlantic world. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be The Met’s iconic The Gulf Stream, a painting that reveals Homer’s lifelong engagement with the charged subjects of race, geopolitics, and nature. Featuring 88 oils and watercolors, this major loan exhibition represents the largest critical overview of Homer’s art and life in more than a quarter of a century.
Continue reading “The Met Unveils Winslow Homer’s Watercolors & Oil Paintings this April, 2022”
The Costume Institute’s 2022 spring exhibition, In America: An Anthology of Fashion—the second of a two-part presentation—will explore the foundations of American fashion through a series of sartorial displays featuring individual designers and dressmakers who worked in the United States from the 19th to the mid-late 20th century.
On Saturday, October 2, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will host MetFest, an afternoon filled with special programs, performances, art-making activities, behind-the-scenes tours, food experiences, and more, with artists and community partners from across the five boroughs. Taking place both outside—on The Met’s David H. Koch Plaza—and inside—at the Museum’s Fifth Avenue location—from noon to 6 p.m., MetFest will celebrate the resilience of New York City and its people and be a moment to reflect on the meaning and inspiration that art can bring to our lives. Programming will be both in person and online and offered in multiple languages. MetFest will be free on the plaza and free with Museum admission inside the building for audiences of all ages and abilities.
Continue reading “Let’s Party! The Inaugural MetFest ~ October 2, 2021”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that it will unveil a new installation of two eighth-century Maya stone monuments, known as stelae, in its iconic Great Hall on September 2, 2021.
The two massive stelae—both significant long-term loans from the Republic of Guatemala—feature life-sized representations of influential Indigenous American rulers: a king, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II (ca. A.D. 664–729), and queen, Ix Wak Jalam Chan (Lady Six Sky) (ca. A.D. 670s–741), one of the most powerful women known by name from the ancient Americas. The installation heralds the upcoming exhibition Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art, which is scheduled to open in fall 2022 and will highlight Maya visual narratives featuring a cast of gods: sacred beings that are personified elements of the cosmos, nature, and agriculture. The Great Hall display is also the first in a series of special exhibitions and installations that will present art of the ancient Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania throughout The Met’s galleries while the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing is closed for a renovation project that will reenvision these collections for a new generation of visitors.
The Costume Institute’s next major exhibition will be a two-part show on view from September 18, 2021 through September 5, 2022. Part One, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion—opening in the Anna Wintour Costume Center on September 18, 2021 ~ will feature approximately 80 individual ensembles encased and arranged as “squares” in horizontal and vertical rows representing the qualities that collectively define American fashion. Part Two, In America: An Anthology of Fashion—opening in the American Wing period rooms on May 5, 2022—will explore the development of American fashion by presenting narratives that relate to the complex and layered histories of those spaces. Parts One and Two will close on September 5, 2022.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its lineup of exhibitions for fall 2021, along with highlights of the in-person programs resuming over the summer and fall.
Continue reading “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Unfolds a Fabulous Fall 2021 Season”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Civic Practice Partnership Artist-in-Residence, Miguel Luciano, is having a party and we’re all invited! The block party is a celebration of his new exhibition, on view at Hope Community Inc.’s Galeria del Barrio, and it is also a celebration of the culmination of Luciano’s there-year residency at The Met.
Continue reading “Miguel Luciano: Cemi-Libre Block Party Celebration & Exhibition in East Harlem”
The New Woman of the 1920s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Opening July 2, 2021 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New Woman Behind the Camera will feature 185 photographs, photo books, and illustrated magazines by 120 photographers from over 20 countries. This groundbreaking exhibition will highlight the work of the diverse “new” women who made significant advances in modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Continue reading “The New Woman Behind the Camera to Open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in July”
Continue reading “The Met’s New Facade Commission will Feature Carol Bove, on view March 1, 2021”
Alice Neel: People Come First is the first museum retrospective in New York of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) in 20 years. This ambitious, career-spanning survey at The Met positions Neel as one of the century’s most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art, as demonstrated in the survey’s approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors. Alice Neel: People Come First will be on view March 22 through August 1, 2021.
Between 1933 and 1942, The Metropolitan Museum of Art organized one of its especially noteworthy landmark educational initiatives to bring the Museum’s collection to as many New Yorkers as possible. Called the Neighborhood Circulating Exhibitions, the series consisted of small, thematic displays of select artworks presented in New York Public Library branches, high schools, city universities, and settlement houses. The effort, which was developed in response to an inquiry from a high school teacher, reached more than two million visitors and will be the focus of the exhibition Art for the Community: The Met’s Circulating Textile Exhibitions, 1933–1942, on view October 31, 2020, through June 13, 2021, in honor of The Met’s 150th anniversary.
Continue reading “Art for the Community: The Met’s Circulating Textile Exhibitions, 1933-42”
The Met announced today the discovery of a painting by esteemed American artist Jacob Lawrence that has been missing for decades. The panel is one of 30 that comprise Lawrence’s powerful epic, Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954–56), and it will be reunited immediately with the series, now on view at The Met through November 1 in Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. Titled by the artist There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786, the work depicts Shays’ Rebellion, the consequential uprising of struggling farmers in western Massachusetts led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays; it protested the state’s heavy taxation and spurred the writing of the U.S. Constitution and efforts to strengthen federal power. The panel is number 16 in the Struggle series.
Continue reading “The MET Discovered a Missing Jacob Lawrence!”
The Costume Institute’s upcoming exhibition About Time: Fashion and Duration (on view October 29, 2020 to February 7, 2021) will trace 150 years of fashion, from 1870 to the present, along a disrupted timeline, in honor of the Museum’s 150th anniversary. Employing philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée—the continuity of time—the exhibition will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate the past, present, and future. The concept will also be examined through the writings of Virginia Woolf, who will serve as the exhibition’s “ghost narrator.”
Continue reading “About Time: Fashion & Duration to Open at The MET”
Returning to The Met for the 13th consecutive year, the exhibition P.S. Art: Celebrating the Creative Spirit of NYC Kids will feature works of art in a variety of media created by public school students in New York City. The exhibition will be on view from October 8, 2020, through February 14, 2021, at The Met Fifth Avenue in the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education. On the evening of October 8, there will be a private virtual opening ceremony with remarks at 5 p.m. by Max Hollein, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Richard A. Carranza, Schools Chancellor; and Alison Scott-Williams, President of Studio in a School NYC. P.S. Art 2020: Celebrating the Creative Spirit of NYC Kids is a project of the New York City Department of Education and Studio in a School NYC.
Continue reading “#PSArt2020 ~ Art by NYC Public School Students at The Met”
In anticipation of its reopening on August 29, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will unveil tomorrow a timely new work of art on its Fifth Avenue facade—for the first time dedicating the spaces usually used for exhibition banners to display art. The work, Yoko Ono’s DREAM TOGETHER (2020), offers a powerful message of hope and unity to the world. Created by the artist in response to the global COVID-19 crisis, the two banners, measuring 24 x 26 feet, are composed of black letters on a white field, with the word “DREAM” placed south of the Museum’s main entrance and the word “TOGETHER” to the north.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will reopen its doors on August 29th with three new exhibitions, including The Roof Garden Commission, Héctor Zamora: Lattice Detour.
Continue reading “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Reopens August 29th”
The Museum will be reopening on August 29, 2020. Check visitors page for details.
In 2020, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its founding with a dynamic range of exhibitions, programs, and public events. Highlights of the year will include the exhibition Making The Met, 1870–2020, on view March 30–August 2; the opening of the newly renovated and reimagined galleries devoted to British decorative arts and design in March; the display of new gifts throughout the Museum; a three-day-long celebration in June; and a story-collecting initiative.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled two monumental new paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman in the Museum’s main entrance hall. The Great Hall Commission: Kent Monkman, mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) inaugurated a new series of contemporary commissions in the Museum’s Great Hall. In his work, Monkman reappropriates images, motifs, and techniques from art history to express Indigenous people’s experiences and histories, subverting the predominate narratives of Euro-American culture, while also addressing present-day issues.
Continue reading “Kent Monkman: mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) in The Great Hall at The MET”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled four installations on the facade of The Met Fifth Avenue, entitled The Facade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, The NewOnes, will free us. Wangechi Mutu was selected to create sculptures for The Met’s Fifth Avenue façade niches—the first-ever such installation on the Museum’s historic exterior—inaugurating a new annual artist commission series. The works were unveiled on September 9, 2019.
Continue reading “Wangechi Mutu Welcomes Visitors on The MET Facade with The NewOnes, will free Us”
Where were you on July 20th, 1969? Like millions of people, you were probably glued to your television, watching the first images of American astronauts on the moon. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20th, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its doors to the exhibition, Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography.
Through more than 250 objects dating from the seventeenth century to the present, The Costume Institute’s spring 2019 exhibition will explore the origins of camp’s exuberant aesthetic. Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp‘” provides the framework for the exhibition, which examines how the elements of irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, and exaggeration are expressed in fashion.
Continue reading “CAMP: Notes on Fashion opening at The Met”
Join The Metropolitan Museum of Art in two thoughtful events in the wake of the Notre-Dame fire.
Continue reading “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Speaks to the Notre-Dame Fire”
The iconic instruments of Rock & Roll will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with instruments played by artists such as Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, Bob Dylan, Don Felder, Kim Gordon, Jimi Hendrix, James Hetfield, Wanda Jackson, Joan Jett, Lady Gaga, Steve Miller, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Page, Kate Pierson, Elvis Presley, Prince, Keith Richards, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Eddie Van Halen, St. Vincent, Tina Weymouth, Nancy Wilson, and others. Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll opens April 8th!
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Love jewelry? Then, you’ll love the exhibition Jewelry: The Body Transformed at The MET. On display are more than 230 objects drawn almost exclusively from The Met collection.
Continue reading “Jewelry: The Body Transformed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art”
Take a photographic journey back in time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey ~ a display of Girault’s daguerreotype process using oversized plates and innovative formats to produce what is today the world’s oldest photographic archive. This is the first exhibition in the United States devoted to Girault, focusing on his Mediterranean journey, with this exhibit featuring approximately 120 of his daguerreotypes, supplemented by examples of his graphic work, watercolors, paintings, and his lithographically illustrated publications.
One of the many signs that Spring is here is when The Roof Garden opens at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Huma Bhabha, We Come in Peace has landed.
Continue reading “‘We Come in Peace’ Lands on The Roof Garden at The MET”
