The artist Lorraine O’Grady once wrote of her third-grade geography teacher pulling down a map and saying, “Children, this is Africa, except Egypt — which is part of the Middle East.” Her teacher was merely repeating what archaeologists, curators and art historians had long insisted — that Egypt was more “Mediterranean” than “African,” and a precursor to the achievements of Greek and Roman civilizations. But it defied what O’Grady could see with her own eyes.
The memory, along with a trip to Cairo in the early 1960s, led O’Grady to dive into a study of the history of Egypt. Her research resulted in one of O’Grady’s first performance pieces, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline” (1980), in which she observed the almost uncanny resemblance between Queen Nefertiti’s relatives and O’Grady’s mixed-race family. Maybe Egypt and Africa weren’t as separate as Egyptologists wanted us to believe.
“Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline” and a later photo series, “Miscegenated Family Album,” based on that performance, are at the heart of a major exhibition opening Nov. 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Titled “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 — Now,” it will feature almost 200 works made largely by African American artists looking to define their cultural history after the violent legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which severed people of African origin from their roots. (That historical injustice went hand in hand with the denigration of African culture as inferior to the greatness of Europe.) For Black artists from the 19th century to today, claiming ancient Egypt as their own has been a way of asserting agency and power.
The exhibition, curated by the Met’s Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, will include painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video, along with album covers, media and fashion by artists across disciplines and generations. They include the visual artists Aaron Douglas, Loïs Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the comedian Richard Pryor; the Afrofuturist band leader Sun Ra; and the singer Solange Knowles.
To a degree unprecedented at the Met, it will also feature live performances that draw on ancient Egyptian themes. Eleven artists will present works in a “performance pyramid” embedded within the exhibition. This is not the first time the Met has incorporated performance into its galleries — Jacolby Satterwhite’s Great Hall commission in 2023 was a spectacular example. But this is the first time performance has been so interwoven in a show.
“Performance is an integral part of this history, and I couldn’t envision mounting this exhibition without giving it its proper space,” Tommasino said in a recent interview.
Limor Tomer, who recently stepped down as the general manager of the Met’s Live Arts department, helped develop the performance program. “Max Hollein, our director, always says that we don’t need more objects, we need more ideas,” she said.
The artists mostly worked with collaborators to realize their works. “Go Forth,” a piece by Kaneza Schaal, who works in theater, opera and film, will incorporate projection, song and dance to explore ideas from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The performance artist Clifford Owens will present “Luxor Solo (Mystical Score for the Ghost of Bud Powell),” composed by Terry Adkins, who died in 2014. Steffani Jemison’s “Recitatif: Perfect Mind” will meld spoken word, music and projections. It is the result of her long fascination with a divine Coptic poem that shows up in the work of figures like Toni Morrison and the filmmaker Julie Dash. The musician and composer Luke Stewart will perform “Kemetic Hymns,” which looks to the ways ancient Egypt has been adopted by Sun Ra and other musical artists in the show to counter the erasure of Black cultural identity.
For the dancer Sidra Bell, who had not previously engaged with the history of ancient Egypt, the Met commission offered an opportunity to see her practice in a new light. “I’m feeling references to Egypt that have always been there, things that I thought were just abstract shapes and movements,” she said in a phone interview. “I think, oh, I’ve done that visually in my work, where did that come from? So that’s kind of a fun discovery, seeing where the symbols and semiotics of that culture have always undergirded my work. It’s an embodied archive.”
The curator and choreographer Rashida Bumbray is creating a piece titled “Way Down” that, the artist said, “responded to rising global fascism.” It takes inspiration from the legendary dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, whose work for the 1948 film “Casbah” explored the intertwining of North African, West African and Caribbean movement. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Dunham’s idea of what it meant to create a Pan-African or transnational language,” Bumbray said. “What are the psychic and spiritual tools that are embedded in that movement language?”
While it is customary for encyclopedic museums like the Met to invite artists into their galleries to “activate” historical objects in their permanent collections — as the Indian artist Nikhil Chopra did in 2019 — with “Flight into Egypt,” the exhibition didn’t yet exist. So artists were given a PowerPoint introduction by the curators and left to devise their ideas independently. Tommasino anticipates that many exhibition-goers will encounter performances unexpectedly as they make their way through the show.
Adding to the complications, curators don’t know exactly what the artists will end up presenting. For David Breslin, the Met’s curator in charge of modern and contemporary art, that’s exactly what makes the endeavor so exciting. “You don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s something that museums like the Met maybe haven’t historically embraced, but it’s a spirit that we want to bring into the future. It takes a different mind-set. It takes longer. There are more conversations, more Zoom meetings. Performance necessitates that you have to be thinking across departments all the time, which is a sea change.”
The Met has long sequestered ancient Egypt and African art at opposite ends of the building. The African collection is housed upstairs, in the glass-walled Michael C. Rockefeller wing on the south side (and closed for renovation until May 2025). Critics and artists have clamored for a deeper connection to the Egyptian wing, on the north side. A temporary installation titled “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (which ran through October) paired holdings from West and Central African and Ancient Egypt, giving a glimmer of how the relationship of the two collections could meld.
Although Hollein, the Met director, refers to Egypt as “an African civilization” in communications about the new show, exhibitions like “The African Origin of Civilization” and “Flight into Egypt” will likely have little impact on how the permanent collection will be shown once the Rockefeller wing is reopened.
The Met will not introduce objects from the Egyptian collection into the Rockefeller wing. “The Met’s Ancient Egyptian collection will remain where it has always been in the Egyptian Wing,” the museum said in a follow-up email statement.
The continuing distinction between the two collections preserves what Tommasino, in a surprisingly frank statement in the catalog, describes as “Egyptian exceptionalism.”
For Stewart, the composer, the persistence of that framing makes his part in “Flight Into Egypt” — a show about the way African Americans have challenged such understandings for the past 150 years — even more urgent.
“This is an exhibit at one of the, if not the, most lauded art institutions in the world,” he said. “To do it in the belly of the beast, so to speak, feels like a big, subversive statement.”
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