Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of 

Helene Schjerfbeck

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

December 5, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862‒1946)

Self-Portrait, 1912 

Oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 16 1/2 in. (43.5 × 42 cm) 

Finnish National Gallery Collection, 

Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (A-2016-51) 

Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

Beloved in Nordic countries for her highly original style, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is relatively unknown to the rest of the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work. Featuring nearly 60 works on canvas—including generous loans from the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, other Finnish museums, and private collections in Finland and Sweden—the exhibition will be on view December 5, 2025, through April 5, 2026.

Born in Helsinki, Helene Schjerfbeck witnessed civil war and two World Wars as well as the burgeoning of Finland’s national identity following independence from Russian rule in 1917. Despite many personal hardships, Helene Schjerfbeck never wavered in her determination to pursue her passion, painting for most of her life in a remote Nordic country, far removed from Europe’s centers of cultural upheaval and renewal. She once said resolutely, “All that I desire to do is to paint… there is always something to conquer.”

“Seeing Silence highlights the work of an extraordinary artist who, though long celebrated in Norway and Sweden as the most outstanding female painter of her time, has not yet achieved well-deserved visibility on this side of the Atlantic,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The exhibition invites audiences here to experience Helene Schjerfbeck’s mesmerizing works and distinctive vision for the first time at a major U.S. museum, showcasing the remarkable perspective and introspection of an artist wholly dedicated to her craft over the course of eight decades.”

Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met, said, “Painting in remote Finland without recourse to broader culture and the exchange of contemporary ideas, Schjerfbeck created her own language every day at her easel by sheer force of will. Seeing Silence looks beyond art history’s cultural mainstream to one woman who overcame immense struggles to produce a powerful body of work, highlighting her rightful place in the story of modernism.”

Seeing Silence traces Schjerfbeck’s artistic development from her early years in Helsinki to the end of her life in Sweden, illuminating the artist’s evolving style from traditional subjects in a naturalist vein to a painterly language of spare, often densely worked imagery. Schjerfbeck sanded and scratched through layers of paint, sometimes exposing the rough weave of her canvases as she experimented with her materials. As a valuable voice among the many strands of modernism at play throughout the world in the early 20th century, Schjerfbeck expressed a unique visual language that deserves recognition in the codified narratives of art history.

The exhibition unfolds thematically, beginning with an exploration of Schjerfbeck’s early years. Recognized as a prodigy at a young age, she won several grants to study in Paris and from there she took excursions to Concarneau in Brittany and later St Ives in Cornwall. Many of her early figure studies were painted in the art schools of Paris, while her more sentimental genre subjects reflect her rural travels. Schooled among artists working in naturalism, she created figure painting and landscapes that followed in step. Within a few years, she was showing paintings at the Salon, Paris’s annual art exhibition, and testing the boundaries of conservative painting.

In the next section, several large-scale canvases commemorate Finnish heritage. After centuries of Swedish occupation, followed by Russian rule, Finland was affirming its cultural identity. A history painting won Schjerfbeck a grant to study in Paris. Later, her compelling allusion to the Jewish festival of Sukkot earned her entrée to the annual state-sponsored Salon in 1883.

In 1902, Helene Schjerfbeck moved to Hyvinkää, a small railroad town several hours north of Helsinki, to care for her aging mother. The isolation of a rural setting enabled her to paint without the disruptions of city life. In modest accommodations and without access to professional models, she painted some of her most affecting canvases, often single figures dressed in black with little color to interrupt their dark silhouettes. Her mother, despite having no interest in her daughter’s vocation, was co-opted to model on several occasions. By this point in her career, Helene Schjerfbeck had radically redefined her aesthetic language. Soft brushwork characterizes these quiet paintings. Whether sitting or standing, reading or sewing, her subjects fill the picture plane and avert their gaze. Often bathed in raking light, her figures appear lost in thought and lost in time. Helene Schjerfbeck investigates formal language—light, space, volume—not the soul of the sitter. She told her models to look away as she painted them, demanded their silence, and refused to show them the end result. Essential to her practice at the start of a painting, the models were dismissed when Schjerfbeck’s inventive powers took charge.

A subsequent section presents a sequence of portraits from the 1920s and 1930s. Helene Schjerfbeck rarely noted a sitter’s name in her titles, and it is very likely that she suppressed her sitters’ identities for the same reasons she eschewed mimetic portraiture: in the few instances when she strove to transfer a likeness to canvas, her efforts often frustrated her until she got it right. Many of her sitters sport modish dress, evidence of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong interest in French fashion. After reading a 1912 article in an art magazine, she fell for the paintings of El Greco (1541–1614). Though she had no access to the originals, she worked up rather stylized transcriptions of his Madonnas and other sacred subjects, a preoccupation that intensified during World War II.

In 1894, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to Vienna and Florence to copy works by the painters Holbein, Velázquez, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Giorgione. While in Italy, she painted several ethereal landscapes of Fiesole, perched on a hill above Florence. There, no doubt, she studied the beautiful yet degraded frescoes decorating the city’s churches.

Spanning 50 years of Schjerfbeck’s career, still-life paintings illustrate the artist’s shifting creative language. The Red Apples (1915), unique in her career for its glowing palette, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive technique of layering and removing paint to achieve complex structures. By the 1930s, the artist had reduced her still-life palette to more somber tones, exploiting her fruits to further her surface experiments. In her final still life, painted in 1944, blackening apples metaphorically reference the devastation of World War II and the chaos of upheaval.

Helene Schjerfbeck interrogated her likeness in 40 self-portraits across her lifetime. Her canvases trace the arc of her artistic development as they materialize her physical growth and decline. From youthful expressions in a naturalistic language to facial distortions that anticipate the haunting finale of this series, Schjerfbeck captures her self-image with increasing idiosyncrasy and self-confidence.

In Schjerfbeck’s final years, as war raged throughout Finland, her art dealer persuaded her to relocate to Sweden. From 1944 to her death in 1946, she resided in a hotel in Stockholm. There she painted 20 of her 40 self-portraits. Few other series in the history of modern art articulate mortality with such candor, as the artist used thin, glazed color to produce monochrome representations that are at once haunting and magnificent meditations on the effects of age and illness.

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is curated by Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, director of the Ateneum Art Museum, is the consulting curator.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

This exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. The exhibition is made possible by Elsa A. Brule.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 964

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

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View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

October 28, 2025 – May 3, 2026

Délio Jasse (Angolan, born 1980)

Untitled, from the series "Terreno Ocupado", 2014

Cyanotype

Sheet: 22 1/16 × 29 15/16 in. (56 × 76 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

© Délio Jasse

Luo Yongjin (Chinese, born 1960)

Oriental Plaza, Beijing, 1998–2002

Inkjet print

Unrolled: 14 9/16 in. × 13 ft. 10 15/16 in. (37 × 424 cm)

Box: 3 3/4 × 17 5/16 × 3 15/16 in. (9.6 × 44 × 10 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

© Luo Yongjin

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection, a preview of a landmark promised gift of photographs from Artur Walther. Assembled over three decades and across five continents, Walther’s vast collection of over 6,500 photographs and time-based media is regarded as among the finest in the world. The 40 works in View Finding introduce his landmark gift and considers how artists across the globe use the camera to navigate shifting terrain. 

“This remarkable promised gift from The Walther Collection marks a watershed moment at The Met,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “View Finding’s carefully curated selection brings iconic works into conversation with new and emerging artistic voices. We are deeply grateful to Artur and his foundation for this gift that profoundly expands our ability to tell a global history of photography.”

Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added, “At The Met, The Walther Collection will become an essential resource for scholars and museum goers. Introducing its phenomenal range of works, this exhibition situates the camera as a powerful tool for social critique, reflection, and change.”

Aida Silvestri (Eritrean, born 1978)

Awet. Eritrea to London by car, boat, lorry, train

and aeroplane, 2013

Image: 34 7/16 × 24 13/16 in. (87.5 × 63 cm)

Text: 11 × 8 1/8 in. (28 × 20.7 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

© Aida Silvestri

Kohei Yoshiyuki (Japanese, born 1946)

Untitled, from the series "The Park", 1971

Gelatin silver print

Image: 12 5/16 × 18 3/8 in. (31.2 × 46.7 cm)

Sheet: 15 7/8 × 19 13/16 in. (40.3 × 50.4 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

© Kohei Yoshiyuki

The modern and contemporary photographs in View Finding highlight photographic practices across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Both inventive and politically urgent, these projects engage the pressing issues of their time. Responding to transformations of the landscape and built environment, they investigate the effects of architecture and spatial planning on identity and social order. In apartheid-era Johannesburg, as in industrializing Shenzen and post-colonial Dakar, they register and reshape environments in flux, looking anew at how we traverse them.

The exhibition introduces many new artists to the Museum and celebrates their Met debut. Works by Santu Mofokeng, François-Xavier Gbré, Luo Yongjin, and others expand and enrich the collection and testify to the dynamic role of the camera in contemporary art making across the globe. Much of their work serves an intermediary role and reflects broader histories of creative work: Delio Jasse reprises the 19th-century cyanotype process to make new views of industrializing Angola, and Aida Silvestri stitches embroidery thread into her prints to chart the perilous migratory paths of Eritrean refugees. In a time-based media presentation, collaborators Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse explore an infamous Johannesburg apartment building as an emblem of apartheid and its aftermath. Artur Walther commissioned their 12-channel slideshow, Windows, Ponte City (2008–11), which appears at The Met in a bespoke installation.

View Finding explores a spectrum of photographic practice, from the formal to the applied. The show features street scenes by Lisette Model and Nobuyoshi Araki, and cool-eyed conceptual projects by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Günther Förg, and Thomas Ruff. The work of these lauded practitioners keeps company with that of emerging artists and endeavors far outside the realm of fine art—among them, views by French and American photographers for hire and NASA dispatches from deep space. Such vernacular materials are a recent focus of The Walther Collection, and their inclusion here testifies to the scope of the medium’s artistic, scientific, and commercial aims.

“When Artur Walther began to acquire photography, he aimed to expand the parameters of the field,” said Virginia McBride, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs. “In turn, View Finding presents international perspectives on hyperlocal subjects. With inventive eyes, the photographers in View Finding study the sidewalks of Nairobi and storefronts of Fifth Avenue. They search public parks from Tokyo to Tangier. In private bedrooms, parking lots, and other places easy to overlook, they focus in, finding—here and there—unlikely sites of self-reflection and social change.”

Santu Mofokeng (South African, 1956–2020)

Winter in Tembisa, 1991

Gelatin silver print

Image: 14 15/16 × 22 13/16 in. (38 × 58 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

© Santu Mofokeng

François-Xavier Gbré (Ivorian, born France, born 1978)

Salle des avocats, Palais de Justice, Cap Manuel, Dakar, 2014

Chromogenic print

Image: 39 3/8 × 59 1/16 in. (100 × 150 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

© François-Xavier Gbré

The Walther Collection Overview

The Walther Collection is principally known for its photographs by 20th-century and contemporary artists from across the African continent. Walther conceived the collection to explore how photographers documented the enormous social change that has unfolded over the last century. Highlights include photographs by Santu Mofokeng and Yto Barrada, whose works are shown in View Finding, along with Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, Zanele Muholi, Lebohang Kganye, and J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere. These and other artists in the collection use the camera to explore shifting roles of identity and interrogate experiences of migration, colonialism, war, and industrialization. The collection holds superb photographs by the most prominent African photographers in South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Congo, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Morocco.

The Walther Collection is equally rich in late 20th-century and contemporary photographs and video from China. These works show the widespread adoption of the camera by successive generations of Chinese artists after the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. The photographers respond to transformative changes not only to the urban landscape but also to social relations and everyday life. Notable examples include works by Luo Yongjin and Weng Fen, whose works are presented in View Finding. Other preeminent practitioners include Ai Weiwei, Hai Bo, and Yang Fudong. The collection also includes a significant group of Japanese photographs, with large holdings of works by Nobuyoshi Araki, whose intimate visual diary of Tokyo appears in the exhibition.

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, active 1959–2007)

Grain Elevators, 1982–2001

15 gelatin silver prints

22.17 x 18.23 x 1.1 in. (56.3 x 46.3 x 2.8 cm), each

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of Artur Walther

© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher

Walther first began to build a collection of photographs from his homeland of Germany. A key early acquisition—an outstanding typology by Bernd and Hilla Becher—is featured in View Finding, illustrating a visual framework that would come to shape his subsequent interests. The conceptual legacy of the Bechers runs through the collection and the exhibition.

In 2010, The Walther Collection presented its inaugural exhibition, Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, organized by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, at its newly designed museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany. Since then, the collection has organized nine major thematic and monographic exhibitions at its museum. Several of these exhibitions traveled widely, including to museums in Europe, Mexico, and West Africa. From 2011 to 2021, the Walther Family Foundation also operated The Walther Collection Project Space in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, introducing photographers from Africa and Asia to American audiences for the first time through solo and thematic exhibitions, public programs, and symposia co-organized with Columbia University and New York University. The collection co-published 20 books with Steidl, all of which have broadened the scholarship about modern and contemporary photography by spotlighting artists who have made a substantial contribution to the history of the medium.

About Artur Walther

Artur Walther began collecting photography in the late 1990s, initially focusing on German modernist photography before expanding to contemporary photography and video. In 2010, he established the Walther Family Foundation. The foundation, which operates a large exhibition space in Neu-Ulm, Germany, presents thematic and monographic exhibitions drawn from the collection’s expansive range of photography and media art, including African, Chinese, Japanese, and European holdings of modern and contemporary works, 19th-century photography from Europe and Africa, and vernacular lens-based artwork from across the globe. Walther is the recipient of the 2016 Trustee Award from the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the 2021 Kulturpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh). Born in Neu-Ulm, Germany, he received his MBA from Harvard Business School and was later a partner at Goldman Sachs.

Displays in The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and Tang Wing

Select works from the promised gift have been integrated into The Met’s reimagined galleries for the Arts of Africa, part of the redesigned Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Concurrent with View Finding, an inaugural display explores self-portraiture in the work of artists including Seydou Keïta, Zanele Muholi, and Samuel Fosso. In his acclaimed African Spirits series (2008), Fosso pays tribute to heroes of the African diaspora by adopting the personae of Martin Luther King Jr., Tommie Smith, Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Léopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, among others.

Works from The Walther Collection will also be featured in the forthcoming Tang Wing, where they will enrich presentations of modern and contemporary art from around the world. Designed by architect Frida Escobedo, the 126,000-square-foot, five-story wing is set to open in 2030, with more than 70,000 square feet for the presentation of art and approximately 18,500 square feet of outdoor space spread across the fourth- and fifth-floor terraces.

View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection is co-organized by Jeff Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge, and Virginia McBride, Assistant Curator, both in the Department of Photographs.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, New York

Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, Gallery 851

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Jeffrey Gibson @ The Met Facade, NYC - The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 12, 2025 – June 9, 2026

Portrait of Jeffrey Gibson: Eileen Travell

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of The Genesis Facade Commission:

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

The acclaimed interdisciplinary artist JEFFREY GIBSON has transformed the iconic niches of the Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade with a series of four large-scale sculptures that explore the metamorphic relationships between all living beings and the environment. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Jeffrey Gibson draws from his distinctive style fusing worldviews and imagery with abstraction, text, and color to create these new figurative works cast in bronze. On view through June 9, 2026, The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am marks Gibson’s first major exploration of this material at a monumental scale.

"Jeffrey Gibson is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation and a pioneering figure within the field of native and Indigenous art," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "These new works are based on his signature use of unconventional materials and reimagined forms, employing them to explore often-overlooked histories and the natural world. We’re thrilled to have his monumental sculptures installed on The Met’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade."

David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, said, "Jeffrey Gibson is an artist brilliantly attuned to the varieties of life that our world holds—the human, the animal, the land itself. His art vibrates and bristles with that life, the histories that never leave us, and the futures that his vision makes possible."

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they carry messages between 

light and dark spaces biakak / dawodv / hawk,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they plan and prepare for 

the future fvni / sa lo li / squirrel,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Titled The Animal That Therefore I Am, the installation transforms the Museum’s neoclassical facade into a dynamic stage for Gibson’s ambitious vision of figural presence and ecological kinship. Each 10-foot bronze sculpture takes the form of a regional animal: a hawk, a squirrel, a coyote, and a deer. Using cast elements such as wood, beads, and cloth to build texture, Jeffrey Gibson embraces a new process that expands his sculptural vocabulary. From these reproduced wood supports emerge referential animal forms, with each sculpture formally fusing the animate and the inanimate. Intricately bold, patinated abstract patterning evokes beadwork and textiles drawn from a range of Indigenous visual languages—motifs that are seamlessly integrated into the sculptures’ surfaces.

The works are inspired by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book The Animal That Therefore I Am, which examines the violence inherent in the human domination of animals—a theme Gibson connects to broader cycles of conflict. By selecting species native to the New York area, he reflects on how these creatures have been forced to adapt to human environments, inviting us to consider what they endure and what they might teach us. The Animal That Therefore I Am flanks the Museum entrance, the zoomorphic forms remaining in dialogue with the surrounding landscape, from the natural environment of the Hudson River Valley, where Jeffrey Gibson lives and works, to the urban ecology of Central Park encircling The Met.

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they are witty and transform themselves 

in order to guide us nashoba holba / wayaha / coyote, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they teach us to be sensitive 

and to trust our instincts issi / awi / deer, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.

Artist Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffry Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up in the United States, Germany, and Korea. His expansive body of work ranges from hard-edged abstract paintings to a rich practice of performance and filmmaking to significant work as artist convener and curator. Since the 2000s, Gibson’s work—which often incorporates Indigenous aesthetic and material traditions—has consistently revealed new modalities for abstraction, the use of text, and color, with the artist applying his formal mastery to concepts such as human connection and collective identity. Notably, Gibson’s work has introduced a broad range of recurring sources, material elements, and imagery while offering a critique of the reductive ways in which Indigenous culture has been historically flattened and misappropriated.

Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me (The Broad, 2025); Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT (MASS MoCA, 2024); This Burning World: Jeffrey Gibson (ICA San Francisco, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric (SITE Santa Fe, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: They Come From Fire (Portland Art Museum, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE (deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2022); and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (Denver Art Museum, 2018). Jeffrey Gibson was selected to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition, in 2024. Jeffrey Gibson also conceived of and co-edited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Jeffrey Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019), and is currently an artist in residence at Bard College, in Annandale, New York. He lives and works in Hudson, New York.

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am is conceived by the artist in consultation with Jane Panetta, the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. The exhibition is presented by Genesis.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

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Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson @ The Met, NYC - Largest-Ever Exhibition of Works by American Artist John Wilson

Witnessing Humanity 

The Art of John Wilson 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 20, 2025 – February 8, 2026

John Wilson (American, 1922–2015)

My Brother, 1942 

Oil on panel, 12 x 10 5/8 in. (30.48 x 26.9875 cm) 

Smith College Museum of Art, Purchased, (SC 1943.4.1) 

Courtesy of the Estate of John Wilson

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, the largest exhibition of this artist’s work and his first solo museum show in New York. For over six decades, American artist JOHN WILSON (1922–2015) made powerful and poetic works that reflected his life as a Black American artist and his ongoing quest for racial, social, and economic justice. His art responded to the turbulent times in which he lived, with a focus on such subjects as racial violence, labor, the writings of Richard Wright, the Civil Rights Movement, and street scenes, and also captured intimate images of family life, with a particular focus on fatherhood. Drawing from the collections of The Met, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a dozen other lenders, this exhibition features over 100 artworks made over the course of Wilson’s career, including paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture, as well as illustrations for children’s books and archival material; many of the works have not been shown before. The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).

“While the powerful impact of John Wilson’s art and the enduring relevance of the themes he explored are undeniable, he has not yet received the recognition his work so deeply deserves,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Met. “This landmark exhibition honors Wilson’s extraordinary artistic achievements—illuminating the incredible range of work he produced over five decades—and affirms his place in art history as one of the foremost artists devoted to social justice and portraying the experiences of Black Americans.”

Jennifer Farrell, exhibition co-curator and Jordan Schnitzer Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, said, “Wilson’s art is imbued with compassion and empathy while conveying his anger and distress at the wrenching effects of disenfranchisement, racism, and economic inequality. Challenging deep-seated prejudices and omissions within our national history, Wilson centered the experiences of Black Americans to create images that convey strength, resilience, and humanity. Deeply personal yet widely resonant, his work continues to offer a powerful lens through which to consider today’s urgent dialogues about race, equality, and representation.”

Leslie King Hammond, exhibition co-curator and art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art, said, “John Wilson was an artist of profound resilience and passion for the innate essence of dignity, beauty, and humanity of Black Americans, which he witnessed in families, community, and all humankind. He was intentional and relentless throughout his life to create imagery that demanded respect for the Black body in an America struggling with its contested legacy of slavery.”

Working in a figurative style, John Wilson sought to portray what he called “a universal humanity.” While still a teenager, he was struck by the absence of positive representations of Black Americans and their experiences in both museums and popular culture. To counter such prejudices and omissions, Wilson put the experiences of Black Americans at the center of his work and created images that portrayed dignity and strength.

The exhibition begins with work John Wilson made while in art school in Boston, where his subjects included the horrors of Nazi Germany and American racial violence, as well as portraits of his family and neighborhood. It continues through his time in Paris, Mexico City, and New York, capturing the humanity and scope of Wilson’s art. The exhibition concludes with Wilson’s return to Boston and his focus on portraiture. Included are maquettes and works on paper for two of Wilson’s most celebrated works—his sculpture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the United States Capitol and the monumental sculpture Eternal Presence.

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is co-curated by Jennifer Farrell, Jordan Schnitzer Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met; Leslie King Hammond, art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art; Patrick Murphy, the MFA’s Lia and William Poorvu Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Edward Saywell, the MFA’s Chair of Prints and Drawings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, jointly authored and edited by the MFA and The Met, and produced by MFA Publications. Reproductions of artworks and photographs accompany critical essays and personal reflections, including analyses by art historians, interviews with Wilson’s peers, remembrances from fellow Black creatives, and a full chronology by the late artist’s gallerist.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–693

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

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Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

November 17, 2024 – February 17, 2025

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

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 will feature 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 will 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. 

“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 African 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 will illuminate 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 will present 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 are 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 Carruthers 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 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, Kahil El'Zabar, Zekkereya El-magharbel, Steffani Jemison, Rashid Johnson, Clifford Owens, Kaneza Schaal, Luke Stewart, Kamau Amu Patton, and M. Lamar and The Living Earth Show, with others to be announced. 

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.

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.

The Met Fifth Avenue, New York 

The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899 Floor 2

www.metmuseum.org

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard @ The Met, NYC

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 12, 2024 – January 5, 2025 

Gabriel Fernández Ledesma (Mexican, 1900–1983)

Poster advertising an exhibition of work by young Mexican artists held in the Retiro Park, Madrid (detail), 1929 

Woodcut, letterpress 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Gift of Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, 1930 (30.88.1)

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard at The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–93, explores the rich tradition of printmaking in Mexico—from the 18th century to the mid-20th century—through works drawn mainly from the Museum’s collection. Among the early works presented are those by Mexico’s best-known printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, whose depictions of skeletons engaged in different activities helped establish a global identity for Mexican art. Following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), printmaking proved to be the ideal medium for artists wanting to address social and political concerns and voice resistance to the rise of fascism around the world. Artists also turned to printmaking to reproduce Mexican murals from the 1920s and to create exhibition posters, prints for the popular press, and portfolios celebrating Mexican dress and customs. 

Featuring over 130 works, including woodcuts, lithographs, and screen prints, by artists such as Posada, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Elizabeth Catlett, and Leopoldo Méndez, the exhibition explores how prints were central to artistic identity and practice in Mexico and highlights their effectiveness in addressing social and political issues, a role of the graphic arts that continues today. The bulk of The Met’s expansive collection came through the French-born artist Jean Charlot, whose association with the Museum began in the late 1920s. Charlot donated many of his own prints and works by other artists to The Met, and in the mid-1940s acted on behalf of the Museum to acquire prints in Mexico. 

“This remarkable exhibition evokes the continued resonance of the graphic arts in Mexico and illuminates treasures of The Met collection—many of which have never been exhibited before,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Reflecting a vibrant tradition that is deeply imbued with political and social history, these works exemplify the extraordinary power of print as a medium and the importance of creative expression as response to specific cultural moments.”

Mark McDonald, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, said, “As a long-preferred medium for artists to challenge and support social and political issues, printmaking provides a rich visual record of Mexican history. This exhibition activates The Met’s unique ability to explore this visual history through its extensive holdings of Mexican prints in addition to highlighting a key moment in the Museum’s collecting practice.”

Among the exhibition’s featured works are prints that survive in unique impressions and have not been published, offering a singular glimpse into the breadth of printmaking in Mexico. These include a group of posters from the late 1920s that address public health, workers’ rights, and education. The collection demonstrates The Met’s early interest in Mexican art and culture at a time when there was growing international interest in the subject.

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard is presented in six chronologically organized sections across three galleries. It begins with an overview of the history of Mexican printmaking, emphasizing how prints were central to artistic and political expression in Mexico especially during the 20th century, and a description of how a large number of works came to be in The Met collection through the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who spent most of the 1920s in Mexico. 

The exhibition then explores early printmaking in Mexico starting in the mid-18th century, tracking its development through the end of the 19th century and demonstrating the range of purposes for which prints were used. The first prints created in Mexico in the mid-16th century were woodcuts and engravings for book illustration and devotional purposes; this continued until the mid-19th century, when lithography became the principal medium. In the second half of the 19th century, printed political caricature developed as a powerful tool to defend freedom of thought.

A section about artist José Guadalupe Posada and his contemporaries broadens the narrative of the growth of printmaking in the early 20th century and its many visual manifestations. Posada has often been described as the progenitor of printmaking in Mexico, with a career that spanned a period of tremendous social and political change. 

Next, the exhibition focuses on the Mexican Revolution as the defining event of modern Mexico that tremendously impacted society and artistic expression. The Revolution became the focus of social and political struggle that is most prominently reflected through prints, and interpretations of the Revolution continued to be refined and reinterpreted long after it ended. This section looks at the conflict from its origins and as memory, as well as how it became a reference point for social and political activism in Mexico that continues to this day.

In the post-Revolutionary period, prints became the essential medium for promoting artistic, social, and political values. Public art was key to a state-sponsored effort to establish a new cultural identity. Mural painting has received the most attention—mainly because it is an ambitious undertaking and because of the fame of the artists involved, such as Diego Rivera—but an equally remarkable revival of printmaking took place. Prints showcase Mexico’s political, social, and artistic depth. Woodcuts in particular represented new ideologies related to democracy, education, and the avant-garde. 

A section dedicated to the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphic Art), established in Mexico City in 1937, illuminates the workshop’s development into one of the important printmaking collectives of the 20th century, producing striking posters, flyers, and portfolios that address mainly social and political issues. 

The exhibition concludes with a look at printmaking in the 1940s and beyond, as the preoccupations of the artists associated with the Taller de Gráfica Popular slowly shifted to accommodate middle-class consumption. This section highlights materials including portfolios of limited-edition fine art prints that focus on Mexican dress and customs and children’s book illustrations to evoke the paths along which printmaking developed during the 1940s, often targeting an international market.

Printmaking continues to be widely practiced in Mexico. Inspired by earlier traditions and often referencing revolutionary heroes, symbols, and themes, new communities of artists continue to create remarkable posters and flyers for public display. 

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard is curated by Mark McDonald, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met.

The Met Fifth Avenue

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028 

www.metmuseum.org

Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance @ The Met Fifth Avenue, New York

Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance

The Met Fifth Avenue, New York

April 2 – July 7, 2024

This is the first exhibition to examine an intriguing but largely unknown tradition of Renaissance painting: multisided portraits in which the sitter’s likeness was concealed by a hinged or sliding cover, within a box, or by a dual-faced format. The covers and reverses of these small, private portraits were adorned with puzzle-like emblems, epigrams, allegories, and mythologies that celebrated the sitter’s character, and they represent some of the most inventive and unique secular imagery of the Renaissance. The viewer decoded the meaning of the symbolic portrait before lifting, sliding, or turning the image over to unmask the face below.

The widespread development of these multifaceted objects in Italy and Northern Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries is  explored through approximately 60 double-sided and covered portraits from The Met collection and other American and European institutions, including major loans from the Ashmolean Museum, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, National Gallery of Art in Washington, and more. The presentation will reunite several portraits and their covers that had been split and made part of separate collections. Painted by artists such as Hans Memling, Lucas Cranach, Lorenzo Lotto, and Titian, the works range from portraits intended as portable propaganda to those designed to conceal a lover's identity. These varied three-dimensional, hand-held ensembles shed significant light on the intimate and personal nature of portraits designed as interactive objects.

Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance is curated by Alison Manges Nogueira, Curator, Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org