Tag: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jacolby Satterwhite at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Vastly larger than any work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacolby Satterwhite’s commissioned six-channel projection ‘A Metta Prayer’ transforms the museum’s cavernous lobby space into a celebratory, uplifting and politically insistent digital realm.  Inspired by the Buddhist mantra of loving-kindness, phrases including, “May we always hear ourselves clearly” and “May your martyred fate start a revolution against hate” (seen here) appear over computer generated individuals running as if in a video game to collect ‘mantra coins.’  In the segment pictured here, dancer O’Shea Sibley appears in white sweats, filmed months before he was murdered in a racist and homo-phobic attack in a Midwood gas station last summer.  Satterwhite’s prayer continues, ‘May your candid grace deface, replace this senseless race.’ (The museum will be closed Jan 1st.  On view through Jan 7th.)

Installation view of The Great Hall Commission: Jacolby Satterwhite, A Metta Prayer, Dec 2023.

Denzil Forrester at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Denzil Forrester’s vibrant club painting – one of his 1980s depictions of London’s reggae and dub scene – stands out at the entrance to the Met Museum’s newly rehung contemporary art galleries for its color and movement.  Featuring a DJ on the left and a dancer moving so energetically (s)he’s a blur on the right, the painting captures the way music and people have turned a place into a state of mind.

Dezil Forrester, Dub, oil on canvas, 1985.

Cecily Brown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cecily Brown’s energetic brushwork comes to a boil at the center of her 2006-08 painting, Memento Mori I, a highlight of her current retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.   The museum identifies the roiling mass of white, blue and pinkish tones in the foreground as a tablecloth and place settings being yanked from the table, a reference to an English poem meant to instruct young people not to tip their chairs back.  Elsewhere, a female nude dances with death (inspired by an Edvard Munch print), a tabletop still life proffers an enormous, blood red lobster claw and the heads of two children are positioned to form a skull.  Such reminders of mortality and offers of moral instruction recall highlights from the Met’s historic European painting collections, suggesting the themes’ the continued resonance.  (On view on the Upper East Side through Dec 3rd).

Cecily Brown, Memento Mori I, oil on linen, 2006-08.

Simone Leigh in ‘Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina’

Simone Leigh’s monumental ‘Large Jug’ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition ‘Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina’ draws on the historic and influential pottery produced by enslaved Africans in Old Edgefield prior to the Civil War.  The Met’s current show includes vessels used for food preparation and storage as well as a selection of face jugs, pottery vessels bearing human likenesses and having ritual significance.  In Leigh’s version, facial features have been replaced by large cowrie shells that hint at eyes or mouths but also point to the past use of the shells as currency.  (On view through Feb 5th, 2023).

Simone Leigh, Large Jug, glazed stoneware, 62 1/2 × 40 3/4 × 45 ¾,’21 – 22.

Hew Locke’s Facade Commission ‘Gilt’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

As museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art continue to address accusations of improperly acquired artifacts, the museum’s façade commission of Hew Locke’s ‘Gilt’ is both appropriate and daringly self-critical.  Locke explains that his cast fiberglass sculptures, gilt to resemble valuable artworks, are a pun on ‘guilt’ and a prompt to consider how the objects in the museum have been gathered to satisfy our pleasure.  While a creature at the base of the vessel literally devours it, eyes at the top look on in witness and a figure inspired by an 8th century BCE ivory in the Met’s permanent collection ironically brings tribute to the Assyrian Empire.  (On view on the Met’s façade through May 30th, 2023).

Hew Locke, ‘Trophy 2’ in installation view of the Façade Commission ‘Gilt’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fiberglass, stainless steel, gilding and oil-based paint, Dec 2022.