MetPublications

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection.

The first in-depth study of Man Ray’s groundbreaking rayographs of the 1920s and their interconnections with his Dada and Surrealist works

This revelatory first look at the paintings of Lorna Simpson (b. 1960), an artist who has worked primarily as a photographer for much of her career, examines this significant new development in her practice over the last decade. Simpson's recent works, midway between photography and painting, advance her incisive explorations of gender, race, and history through bodies that emerge and disappear—peering from inky surfaces or dissolving into landscapes of melting ice. Her paintings draw on documentary photographs and images from vintage Ebony and Jet magazines, combining screen-printed collages of found images with washes of colorful ink on fiberglass, wood, or clayboard. The texts in this volume explore how Simpson's fascination with time, memory, and the indeterminacy of representation propels her experiments in works that are both figurative and abstract, portraits and landscapes, paintings and photographs.

This exploration of Jennie C. Jones’s site-specific installation highlights her inspirations, from minimalism and modernism to avant-garde music.

An illuminating profile of one of today’s most innovative architects whose materials-based practice explores how space can provoke emotional response.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection.

Explores the symbolic importance of ancient Egypt to Black artists and other cultural figures, from the nineteenth century to the present.

A reassessment of Paul Rudolph's career, from his modernist Sarasota houses to his controversial Brutalist buildings and later international projects.

Explores Halilaj’s installation which reflects the artist’s experience as a refugee of war and the universal hopes and fears captured in children’s drawing.

Beginning in the 1920s, Upper Manhattan became the center of an explosion of art, writing, and ideas that has since become legendary. But what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the first movement of international modern art led by African Americans, extended far beyond New York City. This volume reexamines the Harlem Renaissance as part of a global flowering of Black creativity, with roots in the New Negro theories and aesthetics of Alain Locke, its founding philosopher, as well as the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Featuring artists such as Aaron Douglas, Charles Henry Alston, Augusta Savage, and William H. Johnson, who synthesized the expressive figuration of the European avant-garde with the aesthetics of African sculpture and folk art to render all aspects of African American city life, this publication also includes works by lesser-known contributors, including Laura Wheeler Waring and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., who took a more classical approach to depicting Black subjects with dignity, interiority, and gravitas. The works of New Negro artists active abroad are also examined in juxtaposition with those of their European and international African diasporan peers, from Germaine Casse and Ronald Moody to Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso. This reframing of a celebrated cultural phenomenon shows how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism.