We call it Egypt; the Greeks called it Aigyptos; but the ancient civilization in the northeast corner of Africa preferred a word with pretty clear roots. Kemet, the name that emerged at the height of the Middle Kingdom, means “the black land,” a reference to the nutrient-rich soil along the banks of the Nile. Every year, after the annual flooding, the black earth nourished an empire.
The soil was rich in other ways: rich in dreams, rich in fantasies. And later there were other ways in which ancient Egypt became understood as a black (or Black) land. “You know, I have long been interested in the Science of races,” Frederick Douglass wrote to his son on a trip to Cairo in 1887, “and especially anxious to know something about the colors and features of Egyptians. It has been the fashion of American writers, to deny that Egyptians were Negroes, and claim that they are of the same race as themselves.”
Douglass, born into slavery, saw ancient Egypt as a self-evidently African civilization. Its pyramids and parchments were therefore a legacy for Black Americans to claim. To say otherwise, he wrote to his son, was to give up “the moral support of Ancient Greatness and to appropriate the same to the white race.”
Who writes the past, and who rewrites it? “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 — Now,” an unusual and audacious exhibition opening Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spotlights a propensity in American culture hiding in plain sight: the attachment, among Black artists, musicians and intellectuals, to ancient Egyptian culture, myth and spirituality. Rambling across a century and a half, with nearly 200 artworks, it explores the colonial roots of modern Egyptology, the Pharaonic motifs of the Harlem Renaissance, the Egyptian iconography of Black Power and other movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and sphinxes and pyramids in the work of everyone from Kara Walker to Richard Pryor.
Organized by Akili Tommasino, a curator in the Met’s modern and contemporary department, “Flight Into Egypt” is one of the largest exhibitions of living artists the Met has mounted for a while — and its more than five dozen practitioners include numerous performance artists, who will pop up throughout the show’s run in a gallery called the “Performance Pyramid.” But alongside the fine art are Anheuser-Busch advertisements of dark-skinned pharaohs, clips of Sun Ra flying to outer space in a neo-Tutankhamen costume, snapshots of Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson in Giza, and a promo reel inviting Black Americans on a “Know Thyself” Egyptian package holiday.
The show is winningly eclectic, beautifully designed, unexpectedly humorous in places, and very much worth fighting over. At its core it is asking a difficult question, though it only dances around an answer: Just how malleable is the classical tradition, and how free are you to play with history? For people descended from slavery, a generational attachment to what Douglass called “Ancient Greatness” has contested the pernicious fiction that Anglo-America was civilization and all else was barbarism. But projecting modern desires onto classical stones has never been a risk-free undertaking.
With its melding of fine art and pop, valuable paintings and Egyptophile tchotchkes, “Flight Into Egypt” firmly presents itself as an exhibition of cultural history, not archaeological study. (Unless I missed her as a lender to “Manet/Degas,” this is the first Met show to thank Beyoncé in its acknowledgments; the singer Erykah Badu has contributed to the catalog.) To my initial surprise, it includes nothing from the Met’s copious Egyptian collections. The focus here is not on objects from 2000 BC, but the inspiration they provided four millennia later.
“Flight Into Egypt” starts from troubled ground: imperialism, race science, and what Nietzsche called “the use and abuse of history.” Modern Egyptology was born alongside Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, and Europeans’ studies of ancient peoples was hopelessly intertwined with colonial ethnology. Archaeologists of the 19th century anxiously cleaved Egypt from neighboring Nubia and other empires of “Black Africa.” British, French and German scholars trotted out biblical passages and bogus family trees to fabricate a solely white origin of civilization. A dreamlike video installation by the musician and artist Terry Adkins, shot in Rome and showing Egyptian obelisks absorbed into European antiquity, establishes this show’s stakes of historical displacement and rediscovery.
By the end of the 20th century, Pan-Africanists and revisionist historians were questioning the ethnic homogeneity of the ancient Mediterranean, and probing the Egyptian influence on the Greek and Roman marbles they esteemed. The first vitrine in this show contains a copy of Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization” (1987), a bombshell of a book that argued that scholars of the 19th century had whitewashed the origins of Greek civilization in Egypt (and Phoenicia). Now broadly dismissed as pseudohistorical, “Black Athena” nevertheless set off years of debate among classicists, archaeologists and Afrocentric historians. It was a prime episode in the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, endlessly discussed in the pages of The New Republic or The Wall Street Journal, and fortified the arguments of those who claimed classical Egypt as (what modern people would call) a Black civilization.
The present show “does not advance that argument from the perspective of archaeology,” Tommasino writes in the catalog. Like many other ancient civilizations, Egypt was a multiethnic society, nourished by successive migrations, comprising peoples of various skin tones all far removed from modern definitions of race. “Flight Into Egypt” instead explores “Egyptian history as a creative catalyst,” which generations of Black artists have drawn from for inspiration, succor or simply glamour. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, a sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance, depicted “Ethiopia” — at the time a metonym for all Africa — as an Egyptian princess, unwinding her mummification and re-emerging in glory. Laura Wheeler Waring’s silhouettes of harpists and lion tamers, rich with Jazz Age Egyptophilia, appeared on covers of The Crisis, the magazine of the N.A.A.C.P. (The logo of the magazine was a sphinx; the back cover might feature an advertisement for “Nile Queen” beauty products.)
Egypt offered a classical ennoblement to African Americans sundered from their past, which explains why images of royalty and power recur through this show. Its first object is nothing less than an empty throne: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s sculpture “Cleopatra’s Chair” (1994) takes the form of a grand seat of oak, concealed by hundreds of cast bronze plaques. Simone Leigh, in a large bronze, depicts the writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts with her left foot slightly forward, as in Egyptian statuary; Henry Taylor paints Michelle Obama as an Egyptian goddess with formidable black wings. Just about anyone can be a pharaoh, a divinity, or at least a priest. I was bemused to see, in a vitrine the Met might usually reserve for priceless antiquities, a brass and copper ankh lent from Baaba Heru Ankh Ra Semahj Se Ptah, a former N.Y.P.D. beat cop turned New York’s leader of esoteric Kemetic spirituality.
For those less inclined to dress-up, there are more powerful abstract works by Black Americans whose engagement with Egypt resolves into pure form. They include an exquisite painting by William T. Williams, “Nu Nile” (1973), whose tremulous gray strokes evoke troubled waters (but whose title indexes a hair pomade); a 12-panel aquatint by Julie Mehretu, who summons both classical Egypt and contemporary Tahrir Square in her agitated abstractions; and an imposing late work from Sam Gilliam, a 3,000-pound wood and aluminum “Pyramid” (2020).
A hallway of record covers, showing everyone from Leontyne Price to Nicki Minaj in Middle Kingdom get-up, leads into a listening room with videos of Alice Coltrane strumming the harp, and Michael Jackson gyrating in the Egyptian-themed, star-studded video for “Remember the Time.” There is also a small gallery with works by contemporary Egyptian artists, which feels more like a dutiful codicil than anything.
Coltrane, better known for her engagement with Indian music and spirituality, says in the video here that the harp “makes me recall Egypt, ancient Egypt. It makes me seem to remember that I have a past or a history there somewhere.” Can we zero in on that linking verb seem? From its biblical title on, this show conceives of Black attachments to Egypt as an escape or retreat. Its key figure, in many ways, is Sun Ra — who renamed himself after an Egyptian deity, and whose 1974 film “Space Is the Place” scrambles past, present and future into a self-authored myth of liberation.
But inventing classical origins, whether from the Nile or the Tiber, was no innocent undertaking in the 20th century. Modern art is pockmarked by fantastical, revanchist or outright murderous attachments to imaginary classical forebears. Classical Greek dance inspired Martha Graham, but also Leni Riefenstahl. And if the artists of “Flight Into Egypt” work toward freedom, it’s no use ignoring that fantasies of Egypt, as of Greece and Rome, have also served purveyors of conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and gender stereotypes.
In this show’s catalog, Tommasino takes pains to distinguish between a Black “appropriation” of Egyptian aesthetics and a direct linkage of ancient and modern populations. He also seeks to insulate modern Black embraces of a glorious past empire — such as identifying with an absolute monarch like Cleopatra — from similar Nazi or Fascist claims to classical heritage. The thrust of this exhibition is that one classicism is about liberation, the other about oppression, voilà, case closed. But what categories do these classical speculations really rupture, and what do they leave intact? Might there be other routes to freedom, perhaps less gilded ones, that do not place such a premium on origins and lineage?
For as the sociologist Paul Gilroy wrote in his 1993 classic “The Black Atlantic,” there’s another Egyptian story that has profoundly animated Black culture for centuries. It’s the story of the Jews of Exodus, taking flight from, rather than into, the Nile Valley. Identifying not with the pharaohs but with those the pharaohs subjugated, Black artists and songwriters inscribed their own history into a universal pursuit of equality and justice; linking one diaspora to another, they affirmed that identity emerges not only from roots but from motion and mixture. Adkins, Mehretu, and so many more artists in “Flight Into Egypt” see precisely that the past is an inspiration but also a lost dream. The reason to rediscover past kings and queens is so all of us can be citizens.
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