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.
“As New York City enjoys this time of reopening after such a challenging year and a half, we are thrilled to resume offering in-person activities and to share the news of our upcoming exhibitions and programs,” commented Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of the Museum. “During the months of closure and since our reopening last August, we have ensured that The Met is able to provide the most ambitious, interesting and diverse programming possible–no matter how many visitors come to our galleries. And throughout this time, we have also continuously worked to prepare an upcoming array of art, performances, and activities that reflects the Museum’s tireless dedication to presenting innovative and thought-provoking ways to connect with art. Our programming also demonstrates The Met’s ongoing engagement with groundbreaking visual and performing artists as well as our commitment to our local and global communities. We look forward to sharing this powerful lineup with all of our audiences over the coming months.”
The Met’s fall exhibition program launches in September with In America: A Lexicon of Fashion(opening September 18), which will celebrate The Costume Institute’s 75th anniversary and explore a modern vocabulary of American fashion. Surrealism Beyond Borders (opening October 11) will reconsider the true “movement” of Surrealism across boundaries of geography and chronology, offering a fresh appraisal that will recast appreciation of this most revolutionary and globe-spanning movement.
On November 5, the Museum will unveil Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, a long-term installation unsettling the very idea of a period room by embracing the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected. This speculative home will be furnished with works from The Met collection—from Bamileke beadwork to contemporary art and design—that foreground generations of Black creativity. Opening December 10,
Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts will draw new parallels between the creations of the Disney Studios and their artistic models, examining Walt Disney’s personal fascination with European art and the use of French motifs in Disney films and theme parks.
The Met’s summer exhibition offerings are equally robust. The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 (which opened on June 26) features more than 90 works of art by some of the most celebrated artists of the Italian Renaissance, including Bronzino, Pontormo, and Cellini. Starting July 2, The New Woman Behind the Camera will feature 185 photographs, photo books, and illustrated magazines by 120 photographers from more than 20 countries that highlight the work of the diverse “new” women who made significant advances in modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s.
In Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art (opening July 31), the twin themes of solitude and togetherness in Chinese art will be explored through 120 works of painting, calligraphy, and decorative arts with depictions of why and how people have either sought space from the world or attempted to bridge the divide between themselves and others.
Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo(opening August 16) explores the intercultural exchange between French-born and trained American artist Jules Tavernier (1844–1889) and the Indigenous Pomo community of Elem at Clear Lake in northern California through approximately 50 works, including paintings, prints, watercolors, and photographs. At The Met Cloisters,
Spain, 1000–1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith (opening August 30) will bring together a group of works that testify to the diversity of Spanish medieval art and display them within the Fuentidueña Chapel gallery, which typically focuses solely on the Christian tradition. Placed in dialogue with each other, the silk textiles, ivory carvings, illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, and monumental sculptures featured in the show will reveal a dynamic, interconnected past.
