Installed under the Met Museum’s central interior staircase, the atmospheric Byzantine Crypt is host to the exhibition ‘Afterlives,’ a show of contemporary art that engages with life after death. Tavares Strachan’s ‘ENOCH,’ titled after the Biblical character who, rather than dying was ‘taken up,’ is one of the show’s standout pieces, a monument to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black American astronaut who died in a flight crash in 1967. The small bronze sculpture resembles an Egyptian canopic urn, a vessel intended to hold partial remains of a deceased person, but is surfaced in gold, adding to the precious quality of the piece. An edition of the sculpture was launched into space as a small, 3U satellite in 2018, symbolically completing a final mission. (On view through Jan 25th, 2026).
