Current highlights include the newly opened exhibition Africa & Byzantium, The Met’s active collaboration with Nigeria’s National Commission of Museum and Monuments, and a program featuring discussions on cultural landmarks in Africa
(New York, November 29, 2023)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today a spotlight on its ongoing engagement with the arts of Africa. Marking a moment in which it has launched a milestone exhibition and as it looks ahead to the spring 2025 reopening of its galleries for African art as part of the re-envisioning of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, The Met’s Africa in Focus feature encompasses a broad scope of exhibitions, partnerships, and programs that reflect the Museum’s decades-long commitment to studying and presenting the arts of Africa. This compendium of The Met’s many points of engagement with Africa is now available in a new online feature, which includes an archive of past, current, and upcoming exhibitions, programs, publications, partnerships, and more.
“Presenting the arts of Africa and partnering with colleagues and institutions on the continent—and in diasporic communities—has long been a priority for The Met,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Africa in Focus is an opportunity to spotlight the importance of African art in the context of The Met collection and programs, and more broadly in the history of art. We’re thrilled to take this moment to celebrate the ongoing collaborations we are currently undertaking with experts and organizations across Africa, which reflect both our strong foundation of engagement and the many initiatives we are planning for the future.”
Art on View
While the Museum’s galleries for African art are closed for an extensive renovation as part of the major reenvisioning of its Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, The Met is currently presenting African art in a number of exhibitions and displays. The newly opened exhibition Africa & Byzantium sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of medieval Africa through nearly 200 stunning works of art, including many rarely or never before seen in public. The show includes loans from partner institutions in Tunisia (Musée d’Enfidha, Musée National d’Art Islamique de Raqqada, and Musée National de Carthage), Egypt (Coptic Museum, Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai), and Sudan (Sudan National Museum).
African art from the Museum’s collection is on display in the ongoing exhibition The African Origin of Civilization, which, for the first time in The Met’s history, presents masterpieces from the Museum’s collections from west and central Africa alongside art from ancient Egypt. As part of the initiative to present works from the permanent collection in dialogue with those of the institution at large, The Met is also displaying works in other permanent collection galleries, including: Islamic Art (Galleries 455 and 456), Medieval Art (Gallery 304), The American Wing (Gallery 753), Arms and Armor (Gallery 376), and European Sculpture and Decorative Arts (Gallery 550).
The ongoing installation Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected. Activated through vision, sound, and storytelling, and furnished with a kaleidoscope of works from The Met collection—from Bamileke beadwork and 19th-century American ceramics to contemporary art and design that celebrates rich and diverse traditions—the room foregrounds generations of African diasporic creativity.
The Met collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately 26,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from the Paleolithic to the Roman period (about 300,000 BCE–4th century CE). Most of the collection is on view in 38 galleries, organized so that a visitor moving through them can "travel" through Egyptian history, starting with the rise of the state in the Predynastic Period (about 4500 BCE), presented in Gallery 101, and ending in Gallery 138, with the last phase of Rome's occupation of Egypt (400 CE).
Partnerships, Collaborations, and Residencies
In addition to ongoing special exhibition projects with partner institutions across Africa, The Met is engaged in a number of important exchanges including with Nigeria’s National Commission of Museums and Monuments (NCMM). As part of a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2021, The Met is collaborating with NCMM to assist in developing a documentation and education initiative with the National Museum, Lagos, that supports stewardship of its outstanding permanent collection that is among the world’s most important repositories of African art and to help use this resource as an education tool to benefit the Nigerian public.
The initiative is occurring in three phases that launched in April 2023 with the establishment of a new residency, to which Chizoba Joy Ephraim—Principal Curator at the National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria—was appointed. That residency focused on understanding documentation protocols and practices in Nigerian museums and developing a plan to digitize these resources and create program ideas to make them into valuable educational resources. During her residency, Ephraim—along with Met experts in curatorial, digital documentation, imaging, and education departments—explored how the collaboration and training with The Met will best suit the future needs of NCMM and the National Museum, Lagos. For the second phase, The Met will host a virtual convening with experts from the NCMM and the National Museum, Lagos, to share findings and discuss options for developing digital documentation capabilities. A workshop in Nigeria will comprise the third phase, which will be devoted to creating a pilot project around documentation and education.
In March 2023, The Met announced that Eileen Musundi—Head of Exhibitions, Directorate of Antiquities, Sites and Monuments at the National Museums of Kenya—was appointed to a four-month residency program beginning March 2023 to join its Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Musundi worked closely with curators from the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, as well as other departments throughout the Museum, while researching a proposal for a traveling loan exhibition of works from The Met collection to Nairobi as well as developing and leading a public education program, which drew on her expertise in African textiles. Titled Textiles and Identity in East Africa, the program was presented in May 2023 and explored cultural legacies and identity in East Africa. A new cohort of Africa residents for the spring will be announced in the coming month. The African art residencies build on decades of academic fellowships at The Met for a distinguished international cohort of Africanists, working directly alongside the African Art collection.
In 2022, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the World Monuments Fund (WMF) announced a collaboration to create digital resources that will be featured across the galleries for African art in The Met's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. The resources aim to provide gallery visitors and online audiences alike with a more expansive view of the richness of artistic and architectural expression on the continent and to provide deep context to the Museum’s collection of sub-Saharan African art. Together, The Met and WMF have jointly selected cultural landmarks from sub-Saharan Africa—some of which are currently inaccessible to most visitors—to include in the project, spotlighting local communities and their unique relationships to their heritage and its preservation. It will afford a geographic survey of sites selected for their cultural and historical significance that span antiquity to the 20th century and also reflect different stages in WMF’s involvement, from those that are currently on the World Monuments Watch to projects that reflect decades of active engagement. Highlighted at regular intervals within the galleries, these digital features will aim to provide individual perspectives on the importance of conservation efforts and the challenges they pose, as well as interactive visuals. The editorial approach and content is being reviewed by an advisory committee composed of experts including Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, Mamadou Diouf, Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and Director of the Institute for African Studies at Columbia University, and Theo Eshetu, artist, among others.
Programs
The Met regularly hosts events, talks, and activities that celebrate art from Africa. This evening, November 29, 2023, The Met, in partnership with World Monuments Fund, will host a program from 6 to 7:15 p.m. exploring topics related to significant cultural heritage sites in Africa. “What Makes a Cultural Landmark? Perspectives from Ethiopia, Ghana, Cameroon, and Uganda” will feature discussions between leading experts, artists, and architects on the care of significant cultural heritage sites, including Lalibela and Tigray in Ethiopia and the Wamala and Kasubi Tombs of the Kingdom of Buganda in Uganda. The program is part of the ongoing collaborative effort betweenThe Met and World Monuments Fund (WMF) to create new digital and in-gallery video content that will reframe the Museum’s African art galleries and provide a rich visual understanding of Africa’s diverse cultural landscapes in the redesigned Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, opening in spring 2025.
The program will open with welcome remarks and an overview of The Met’s engagement with Africa from The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO Max Hollein, and an introduction to the curatorial approach for the Museum’s galleries for African art from Alisa LaGamma, The Met’s Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator in Charge, Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. The panel will be moderated by Bénédicte de Montlaur, President and CEO of the World Monuments Fund, and will feature Takele Merid, Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University (joining virtually); Steven Nelson, Dean, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Jonathan Nsubuga, architect, JE Nsubuga and Associates, Kampala, Uganda (joining virtually); and Yaw Nyarko, Director, NYU Africa House, NYU Center for Technology and Economic Development, and Professor of Economics, New York University. They will be joined by Sosena Solomon, artist, filmmaker, and Research Associate at The Met. Ms. Solomon joined The Met’s curatorial and digital teams in December 2022 to create video content—featuring interviews and archival photos—relating to major cultural landmarks. Over the past year, she has traveled to historic sites in Africa where WMF has project partnerships to produce original and comprehensive video content for the new galleries and The Met’s website.
The program introduces this initiative and will include a preview of Ms. Solomon’s work filmed in situ. Filming has taken place in Great Zimbabwe; Providence Island, Monrovia, Liberia; The Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia; Asante Traditional Buildings, Ghana; Ambohimanga, Madagascar; Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania; Wamala and Kasubi Royal Tombs, Uganda; Debre Tsion, Tigray, Ethiopia; Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Nigeria; and Benin City Earthworks, Nigeria, with several more locations and films in development.
On Friday, December 1, The Met will present Artists on Artworks—Africa & Byzantium, in which artists will reflect on works in the exhibition Africa & Byzantium and make connections to their own artistic practices. The program will feature an introduction to the exhibition—which explores the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had a lasting impact on the Mediterranean world—from curator Andrea Myers Achi. Then, artists Azza El Siddique, Theo Eshetu, and Tsedaye Makonnen will discuss resonant topics raised in the exhibition, including collective memory, identity, and loss in northern and eastern Africa. Hannah Giorgis, staff writer at The Atlantic, will moderate the panel.
Integral to the Met’s Department of Live Arts has been engagement with African performers. Last spring, South African dancer/choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba undertook a month-long residency at the Museum researching a major new work grounded in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing collection. In February 2025, Ethiopian-American artist Tsedaye Makonnen will also present a new performance that animates her installation. For more than a decade Live Arts at The Met has hosted speakers and musicians that have explored the intersections between African art, music, culture, and history. Highlights included the three-part “Mali Now” panel series in 2014, moderated by Harvard professor and scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., with discussions of African art as it interacted with the American avant-garde movement, and Africa’s status as a global influential force in the lead-up to World War I. MetLiveArts regularly presents African performers, both emerging and worldwide legends, including Malian kora virtuoso Ballaké Sissoko, renowned Malian singer Salif Keita, Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astatke, the legend Baaba Maal (who voiced the Wakandan soundtrack of the movie Black Panther), as well as Africa’s reigning diva, Angelique Kidjo—who has performed at the Museum several times and most recently in April 2022 in anticipation of the reinstallation of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.
African Art Across The Met Collection
The scope and diversity of creative expression that has flourished across Africa from antiquity to the present is vast and cannot be addressed within a single survey exhibition or, over the long term, adequately by a single curatorial department. The Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing houses galleries devoted to major artistic traditions from across sub-Saharan Africa encompassing artworks from the 12th century to the recent past. In parallel, the creations of artists from the African continent are found across the institution in a range of curatorial department collection areas, including Egyptian Art, Greek and Roman Art, Medieval Art, Islamic Art, Musical Instruments, Photographs, Drawings and Prints, and Modern and Contemporary Art. A directory of these works of art is available on The Met’s website.
Collection Assessment and Expansion in Watson Library
In July 2020, The Met’s Thomas J. Watson Library launched a large-scale initiative to assess and enhance our holdings by and about African American artists and art. The result was the launch of the Index of African American Artists, a public-facing index of artists represented in exhibition catalogues, monographs, and other publications in the Met libraries. The index is rapidly expanding and currently includes artists of African descent who have lived, worked, or studied in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. To date, Watson staff and volunteers have conducted bibliographic analyses of more than 500 individual artists, comparing publications in existence with publications held by Watson and/or departmental libraries. This ongoing project has led to the purchase of more than 2,000 publications, adding to a collection that is now one of the most comprehensive of its kind.
About the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing
The Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing is undergoing a major renovation project that reenvisions its collections for a new generation of visitors. The galleries—40,000 square feet on the Museum’s south side—are being overhauled and reimagined to reintroduce the department’s three distinct collections of African art, ancient American art, and Oceanic art, displaying them as discrete elements in an overarching wing that is in dialogue with the Museum’s collection as a whole. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing is scheduled to reopen in 2025.
While the galleries are under renovation, activities have focused on gathering new content that ranges from documenting major cultural sites to afford greater context through a partnership with World Monuments Fund; temporary installations that feature highlights of the collection in new dialogues; conservation treatment and photographic documentation of works; residencies for museum professionals; and developing partnerships with institutions on the continent. These initiatives are part of an ongoing commitment to incorporate contemporary voices and perspectives from the region in the shaping of the narratives that will be presented in the new galleries.
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