Exhibition Dates: November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899 Floor 2
Opening at The Met on November 17, 2024, the major exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt through visual, sculptural, literary, musical, scientific, scholarly, religious, political, and performative pursuits. The multisensory exploration of nearly 150 years of artistic and cultural production features nearly 200 works of art in a wide range of media from The Met collection and public and private collections, including critical international loans from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Thematic sections trace how Black artists and other agents of culture have employed ancient Egyptian imagery to craft a unifying identity, the contributions of Black scholars to the study of ancient Egypt, and the engagement of modern and contemporary Egyptian artists with ancient Egypt.
The exhibition is made possible by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Additional support is provided by The Hayden Family Foundation, Allison and Larry Berg, The Holly Peterson Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Ancient Egypt is a symbolic source for people of the African diaspora that continues to inspire. This groundbreaking exhibition brings to light a modern history that has developed over nearly 150 years and is also an active creative tradition existing outside the walls of the Museum and in daily life,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Unprecedented in scope, the exhibition broadly lays out the many ways in which Black artists and cultural figures have engaged and continue to engage with ancient Egypt as a point of reference, inspiration, and connection. Our hope is that it furthers and deepens exploration of this topic.”
“This is a modern history of how an ancient civilization became a wellspring of inspiration for Black creatives to craft a unifying identity after generations of it being underrepresented and undervalued,” said Ford Foundation President Darren Walker. “This is an exhibition that only The Met can do by pulling inspiration from its own collection stretching back 5,000 years and connecting it to today and our communities in New York City and beyond.”
“The exhibition takes its title from The Met’s painting Flight into Egypt (1923), an emblem of fugitivity and timeless creativity by the expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner—the first internationally recognized Black American painter—who traveled to Egypt in 1897, and includes works as recent as Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich’s film Cleopatra at the Mall (2024), which reflects on the rediscovery of Edmonia Lewis’s major sculpture The Death of Cleopatra (1876),” said Akili Tommasino, Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met and the curator of the exhibition. “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now challenges Eurocentric constructions of ancient Egypt, offering a more expansive history that celebrates the contributions of cultural figures of African descent.”
Beginning in the late 19th century, the era of emancipation, Black Americans started to look to ancient Egypt as evidence of an undeniably great ancient African culture to ennoble Black identities, having been systematically stripped of any knowledge of specific African heritage through the transatlantic slave trade, generational enslavement, and dehumanization in American civic life and society. This exhibition illuminates how modern Black artists and cultural figures asserted affinity with ancient Egypt—in opposition to the prevailing definition of 19th-century Egyptology that distinguished ancient Egypt from “Black Africa” and instead characterized it as proto-European—from the late 19th century to the efflorescence of Afrocentric visual art during the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and artistic tendencies of the ensuing decades, to the present day.
While most of the stories in Flight into Egypt are about individuals of African descent born and active in the United States, the work of artists of the Caribbean, Egypt, and other African-born artists active in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere indicate the worldwide resonance of ancient Egypt in the African diaspora—the global dispersion of people of African descent. The exhibition presents both well-known and emerging artists, new works and works new to The Met collection, while also reintroducing rarely displayed works of art and resurfacing obscure objects and documents.
Artists whose work is on view include: Terry Adkins, Ghada Amer, Ayé Aton, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Thomas Biggers, Barbara Higgins Bond, LaKela Brown, Rashida Bumbray, René Burri, George Washington Carver, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Irene Clark, Robert Colescott, Houston Conwill, Renee Cox, Shani Crowe, Jamal Cyrus, Damien Davis, Karon Davis, Noah Davis, Charles Clarence Dawson, C. Daniel Dawson, Jeff Donaldson, Aaron Douglas, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, Dream The Combine (Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers), Oasa DuVerney, The Egyptian Lover, Tremaine Emory, Awol Erizku, Fred Eversley, Derek Fordjour, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Genevieve Gaignard, Ellen Gallagher, Sam Gilliam, Chet Gold, Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Chester Higgins, EJ Hill, Lonnie Holley, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Gregston Hurdle, Iman Issa, Steffani Jemison, Malvin Gray Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Armia Malak Khalil, Jas Knight, Solange Knowles, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Maha Maamoun, Eric N. Mack, Julie Mehretu, Mahmoud Mokhtar, Ronald Moody, John W. Mosley, Lorraine O'Grady, Gordon Parks, Kamau Amu Patton, Robert Pruitt, Richard Pryor, Baaba Heru Ankh Ra Semahj Se Ptah, Sun Ra, Betye Saar, Mahmoud Saïd, Addison N. Scurlock, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Tavares Strachan, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Henry Taylor, Mildred Thompson, Kara Walker, Laura Wheeler Waring, William T. Williams, and Fred Wilson.
In a first for The Met, performance will be an integral part of the exhibition in the form of a dedicated gallery. Organized in collaboration with MetLiveArts, the Performance Pyramid will both present a documentary history of Black performance art animated by ancient Egyptian themes and serve as the locus for live performances on select days throughout the run of the exhibition. The Performance Pyramid will be activated by Sidra Bell, Rashida Bumbray, Karon Davis, Zekkereya El-magharbel, Steffani Jemison, Rashid Johnson with Kahil El’Zabar, Clifford Owens, Kaneza Schaal, Luke Stewart, Kamau Amu Patton, and M. Lamar and The Living Earth Show, with others to be announced.
The Performance Pyramid performances are made possible by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky, and the Adrienne Arsht Fund for Resilience through Art.
Exhibition Overview
Organized into ten sections, including the “Performance Pyramid,” the exhibition opens with two paintings by Henry Ossawa Tanner, who incorporated observational sketches from his travels to Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa into the biblical scenes that would become his best-known works, as well as a brilliant bronze sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud and a film commissioned by The Met from Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. Titled Cleopatra at the Mall, the film pays homage to the rediscovery in the 1980s of Black and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis’s 1876 marble magnum opus The Death of Cleopatra.
The second section, “Egyptology and the Color Line,” foregrounds Black scholarship and counternarratives that emerged in defiance of the Eurocentric institutional and academic Egyptology that began in the late 1700s. Even as Black scholars were excluded, developments in archaeology catalyzed curiosity. George Washington Carver, for example, submitted the patent application for his “Egyptian Blue” pigment in 1923, a year after the rediscovery of the richly painted tomb of Tutankhamun. For this exhibition, a sample of Carver’s pigment was studied by The Met’s scientific research team in collaboration with colleagues at Iowa State University and Tuskegee University; it was determined that the chemical composition is technically Prussian Blue, yet Carver’s marketing of his pigment is a significant cultural reclamation.
“Awakening and Ascent” celebrates the birth of Afrocentric visual art at the beginning of the 20th century, namely the Harlem Renaissance. Printed and painted visions of racial uplift by Aaron Douglas and Laura Wheeler Waring incorporate pharaonic motifs, as does a sculpture by Jamaican artist Ronald Moody. Issues of The Crisis, a magazine founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois, and other rare illustrated Black American publications are accessible in a reading room and discussion space created by artists Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, titled Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet (2011), now in The Met’s collection. Featuring journalistic, literary, and poetic texts, commercial illustrations, and reproductions of artworks in a variety of mediums, the publications collectively encapsulate major aspects of 20th-century Black modernism, and a significant portion reflect Black communities’ claims to and sustained interest in ancient Egypt.
The fourth section, “Heritage Studies”highlights modern and contemporary Egyptian artists’ engagement with ancient Egypt, and features works by Mahmoud Mokhtar and Mahmoud Saïd, the foundational sculptor and painter, respectively, of Egyptian modernism, who revived ancient motifs to promote a national self-image free from colonial interlopers. Contemporary Egyptian artists featured in this sectionengage in both transgressive and traditional forms of appropriation. Iman Issa’s sculpture Heritage Studies #7 (2017) provokes inquiry about the stakes and stewardship of ancient Egyptian artifacts and history. Maha Maamoun’s video and Ghada Amer’s painting convey the resonance of ancient Egyptian icons in popular culture. Two magazine covers separated by decades butsimilarly featuring women in the guise of Nefertiti raise questions about the intersection of cultural property and identity, as does a new wood sculpture by artist and Met security officer Armia Malak Khalil.
The works in “Kings and Queens”reflect the tremendous impact of pharaonic statuary and mural decoration on the figurative expression of Black artists from the 1940s to today.Works such as Fred Wilson’s serial sculpture Grey Area (Brown version) (1993) powerfully visualize the stakes of the color line in the reception of ancient Egypt. Wilson’s five replicas of the famed bust of Nefertiti, in hues ranging from beige to dark brown, convey her tremendous significance as a symbol of beauty and empowerment, while raising, but not settling, debates around the racial identity of the dynastic rulers of ancient Egypt. A number of contemporary works attest to the prevalence of pharaonic imagery in urban Black communities, including Lauren Halsey’s new squared gypsum columns with painted, collaged, and carved surfaces; the photographic cityscape of Genevieve Gaignard’s Kings and Queens (2017); garments from Denim Tears’ 2023 streetwear collection by designer Tremaine Emory; and a selection of volumes commonly available from Afrocentric booksellers.
“Pilgrimage and Fellowship” explores how people of the African diaspora have sought to bridge their distance from the continent through travel and within community. Photographs and video document some of the significant journeys of Black cultural figures to Egypt, which represent powerful acts of reclamation. Religious and political leader Malcolm X visited Egypt three times; subsequent speeches relate his experience of brotherhood with Egyptian nationals and express his conviction that ancient Egypt was proof of a noble ancient Black civilization.
“Nu Nile Abstraction” showcases an eclectic group of geometric and gestural paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, from the 1960s to the present, connecting formal and conceptual references to ancient Egypt with facets of contemporary Black experience. Generations of Black artists have been inspired by the sacred sites and unique terrain of Egypt, from the north-flowing Nile to archetypes of ancient Egyptian architecture and monumental sculpture: the obelisk, pyramid, stele, and sarcophagus. Interpretations of the pyramid, for example, include Rashid Johnson’s painterly relief, Sam Gilliam’s stained wood and aluminum sculpture, and Maren Hassinger’s exuberant installation composed of pink plastic bags (a new Met acquisition).
From cover art to lyrical content, the 33 selected albums on view in “A New Song” trace a history, from the 1930s to now, of Black musical engagement with ancient Egypt. A captivating poster for the 1934 Chicago theatrical production “O, Sing a New Song” promises a spectacular musical journey set in ancient Egypt with an all-Black cast, while the cover for a recording of the opera Aïda features Black American soprano Leontyne Price, who broke barriers when she debuted in the title role in 1957. The adjacent gallery is immersed in light and sound by Awol Erizku’s dazzling disco bust of Nefertiti and features screened excerpts of music-related videos.
The artworks in the final section, “Space Is the Place,”meld ancient Egyptian myth, modern science, and science fiction. In the epic and influential 1974 film Space Is the Place, artist, musician, and poet Sun Ra stars as a messianic extraterrestrial recruiting Black Americans to join a utopian space community inspired by the aesthetics of ancient Egypt. Sun Ra recognized and amplified the inherently cosmic characteristics of ancient Egyptian art in his creative visions, as have Julie Mehretu, Fred Eversley, and Tavares Strachan, whose works are also featured in this gallery.
The exhibition also includes site-specific works of art located outside the Museum that are critical to the story of the ongoing reception of ancient Egypt within Black communities. Beginning in the 1980s, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has commissioned permanent artworks for the public transit system. On this occasion, the MTA has coordinated with The Met to highlight three works inspired by ancient Egypt at subway and Metro-North railroad stations. They include the pyramidal bronze cosmograms of Houston Conwill’s The Open Secret (commissioned 1984, unveiled 1986) at 125th Street (4, 5, 6), Maren Hassinger’s Message from Malcolm mosaic (1998) at 110th Street (2, 3), and Terry Adkins’s aluminum relief panels titled Harlem Encore (1999) at 125th Street Metro-North railroad station.
Curatorial Credits
Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now is organized by Akili Tommasino, Curator, with McClain Groff, Research Associate, in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met.
Education Programs
The exhibition will be accompanied by robust multidisciplinary on-site and off-site educational programs that explore contemporary academic, artistic, and social engagement with ancient Egyptian art and civilization. Programs across audiences—students, families, and educators—will include gallery activations and talks with artists and Met experts as well as workshops focusing on artistic processes and materials.
Among the highlights is a Creative Convening on December 7, 2024, that will bring together artists, scholars, and community members for discussions, performances, and reflections on exhibition themes. Participants include Solange Ashby, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Ming Smith, Chester Higgins, and Awol Erizku. An Open Studio on February 8, 2025, will celebrate the influence of ancient Egypt on Black music culture in the 20th and 21st centuries through an artist demonstration, performance, and a drop-in artmaking activity. Family Afternoon on February 9, 2025, will create space for collaborative drop-in artmaking in connection to ancient Egypt, symbolism, and identities.
Programming details are available on The Met website.
Catalogue
The exhibition catalogue features scholarly essays by Akili Tommasino, Andrea Myers Achi, Makeda Djata Best, and Mia Matthias; artist biographies by Kai Mora; and contributions by artists and musicians: Erykah Badu, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Awol Erizku, Lauren Halsey, Iman Issa, Solange Knowles, Julie Mehretu, Jennifer Newsom, Matthew Shenoda, and Fred Wilson. The catalogue is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and will be available at The Met Store. It will be distributed throughout the world by Yale University Press.
The catalogue is made possible by Mellon Foundation and Denise Littlefield Sobel.
Additional support is provided by The Witten Family Foundation, Lonti Ebers, the Jeffrey and Leslie Fischer Family Foundation, and Kent Kelley.
The exhibition is featured on The Met website, as well as on social media using the hashtag #MetFlightIntoEgypt.
This press release was updated November 14, 2024.
Image: Fred Wilson (American, born 1954). Grey Area (Brown Version), 1993. Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr. and bequest of Richard J. Kempe, by exchange (2008.6a–j)