The Great Hall Commission: Jacolby Satterwhite, A Metta Prayer

Satterwhite populates his virtual world with 163 images and three-dimensional scans of objects from across The Met collections. One of the most prominent is the Fragment of a Queen's Face from Egypt (ca. 1390–1336 BCE). Skillfully carved with hand tools from yellow jasper, the delicate lines of the lips are all that remain of this royal woman's portrait. In A Metta Prayer (2023),  the fragment takes on monumental proportions as a set piece within Satterwhite’s virtual world. In another important scene of the video, photographs taken by Alphonse Bertillon litter the ground of a dystopian landscape. Bertillon invented a system used by law enforcement that measured standard physical characteristics to identify criminals, known today as the mug shot. These nineteenth century images appear alongside Black dancers and sequences of animated police officers dancing en masse to critique the relationship between police and Black communities.

A Metta Prayer  is projected across six walls of The Met's Great Hall, four at the entrance level and two above the second-floor balconies. The content of each video reflects its location, with “ground” scenes of characters clambering through apocalyptic cities and “sky” scenes of cloud-filled heavens teeming with life. Depictions of the Assumption of the Virgin, like this one by Bergognone (Ambrogio di Stefano da Fossano) and this one after Peter Paul Rubens, inspired this compositional split. Such references to Renaissance art and perspective appear frequently in the artist's work.