@metbreuer

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle has landed! The Met recently announced the acquisition of @kentmonkman 's diptych mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) for our permanent collection, news that we are immensely humbled and proud to share on Indigenous Peoples Day. The paintings Welcoming the Newcomers and Resurgence of the People make up the inaugural contemporary commission in the Museum’s Great Hall. They deliver a powerful—and visually spectacular—message confronting widespread, systematic erasure of Indigenous lives, perspectives, and experiences from art history and museum collections. 🎨 Kent Monkman, (Cree, b. 1965). Welcoming the Newcomers, 2019. 132" x 264". Acrylic on Canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Donald R. Sobey Foundation CAF Canada Project Gift, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joseph Hartman   Kent Monkman, (Cree, b. 1965). Resurgence of the People, 2019. 132" x 264". Acrylic on Canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Donald R. Sobey Foundation CAF Canada Project Gift, 2020 Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joseph Hartman

We were delighted that artist Faith Ringgold visited @metmuseum with her daughter, Michele Wallace (left), to view Ringgold’s masterwork Street Story Quilt, 1985, in the exhibition Making The Met. As exhibition curator Laura Corey observed: “Of all the people who have made The Met, it is the artists above all who broaden our perspectives on art and the world around us, from the founders of the Museum to those we are fortunate enough to engage with today.”

This week, artist Carol Bove met with the Met team on a site visit for her 2021 commission for the Museum's facade. Stay tuned for more details!

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Abraham Thomas as Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts. For the past four years, Thomas has worked at the Smithsonian Institution, first as the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge of the Renwick Gallery, and most recently as Senior Curator at the Arts and Industries Building, in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, he was the Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, in London. Before then, Thomas was Curator of Designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he was responsible for the V&A’s Architecture Gallery. “I am thrilled and honored to join The Met, and to work under the leadership of Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art,” Thomas remarked, “and I’m excited to collaborate with colleagues within the Department and across the Museum.”

The Met has opened an installation of the four Birkenau paintings, a landmark series created by renowned German artist Gerhard Richter (born Dresden 1932). Richter’s encounter with the only extant photographs taken by prisoners inside the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau led to the creation of the paintings in 2014. The works speak to Richter’s belief in painting as a powerful means through which to address the complex and often-difficult legacies of both personal and civic history. This long-standing concern can be traced back to some of his earliest work from the 1960s; in the Birkenau series Richter confronts the question of whether—and, if so, how—art is able to reckon with the history of the Holocaust. Initially sketching out the photos on individual canvases, he gradually painted them over to produce heavily disturbed, ruptured surfaces that hover between abstraction and representation. This veiling holds in tension the complex relationship of history and memory, with the opposing forces of destruction and reconstruction. The Met’s current presentation highlights the principal installation of Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, the short-lived but critically acclaimed major exhibition at The Met Breuer, which was forced to close prematurely due to the COVID-19 crisis. It brings together the four canvases of the Birkenau series alongside an earlier work in glass, Mirror, Blood Red (1991), and demonstrates the artist's varied approaches to abstraction. Richter is arguably one of the greatest painters of our time, and as a contemporary master, and a keen student of the traditions of Western painting, it is apposite that this series is seen in the context of the galleries devoted to the Lehman Collection. Gerhard Richter: The Birkenau Paintings is on view in Gallery 955 of the Robert Lehman Wing until January 18, 2021. 📷: Brinda Kumar

In response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the artist Thornton Dial created a body of work reflecting his experience watching the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy on television. In his drawing “9/11: Interrupting the Morning News” faintly drawn faces scattered throughout a thicket of lines represent the towers’ collapse, evoking the lives lost on that day. Museums may not be deemed an essential service during a pandemic, but in times of great misery and historic trauma, they speak to fundamental human needs, delivering moments of solace, inspiration, respite, hope, or just simple escape. We remember all those who have died by the hands of others through violence, forced displacement, and injustice both in the US and internationally and look forward to the day when the global pandemic is behind us and The Met can again welcome visitors from around the world. Thornton Dial (American, 1928-2916), 9/11: Interrupting the Morning News, 2002. Graphite charcoal, and watercolor on paper. Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2014. © Thornton Dial

Unable to travel from Mexico to New York until now due to the pandemic, artist Héctor Zamora finally visited LATTICE DETOUR, his commission for The Met’s roof garden, for the first time today, with Curator Iria Candela. For an interview between the artist and curator see link in bio. Héctor Zamora, Lattice Detour, 2020, commissioned by The Met for The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden ́ctorzamora

Repost from @metamericanwing - to Jacob Lawrence, born on September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This year, Lawrence’s birthday falls on , an annual holiday dedicated to celebrating the achievements of American workers. The strength, struggles, and contributions of laborers to the history of the nation was explored by Lawrence in Panel 6 (seen here) of his 30-panel series, “Struggle: From the History of the American People,” now on view at The Met in the special exhibition “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle.” Lawrence excerpted the panel’s title—“...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honour - 4 July 1776,”—from the final words of the Declaration of Independence, imagining the solemn pledge as the responsibility of every American in a functioning democracy. In the exhibition’s catalogue, the late art historian David C. Driskell describes the power of Lawrence’s laboring figure: “The lone farmer, bearing the burden of a wagonload of hay, carries the weight of independence forward, serving as a key figure of human survival in a hostile environment. The farmer must be prepared to clear the land, till the soil, plant the seeds, and attend to the survival of the crops needed to provide food for himself and the community. Hard labor is implied here as we see the tools needed to ensure a bountiful harvest: rake, pitchfork, and scythe…The struggle to survive and to declare one’s freedom with honor is what is expressed in this panel.” Caption: Jacob Lawrence (American, 1917–2000). “...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honour - 4 July 1776,” 1955. Panel 6 from “Struggle: From the History of the American People,” 1954–56. Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. © 2020 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

One of two recent gifts to The Met, Mrinalini Mukherjee’s sculpture Aranyani, 1996, had been held back by the artist in the hope that it would enter a museum collection. It hails from Mukherjee’s final group of astounding freestanding fiber works. The title translates as “goddess of the forest.” When seen frontally, it seems to be in a state of unfurling, akin to a burgeoning flower. It is also unquestionably erotic, evoking female genitalia. Mukherjee’s depictions of sexuality are compelling for their focus on the potentiality, not the culmination, of pleasure. The work undulates, swells, surges, and ripples, leading not to the ecstasy of climax, but to the interplay of union and division. The Met is the only institution in the world to represent the entirety of the artist’s practice—works in fiber, ceramic, and bronze—in its permanent collection.  Mrinalini Mukherjee Aranyani, 1996 Hemp, 55 7/8 x 50 x 40 15/16” Gift of the Estate of Mrinalini Mukherjee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2020

We are pleased to announce an extraordinary gift from the Estate of Mrinalini Mukherjee: two iconic works, a fiber sculpture, Aranyani, and a ceramic piece, Leaf Totem II, both dating from 1996.    The iconoclast Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015) was a committed sculptor who worked most intensively in the medium of fiber, with significant forays into ceramic and bronze over the course of her forty-year career. Even within the immediate artistic milieu in post-independence India, Mukherjee was an outlier because of her choice of such unconventional materials.  An abiding interest in nature was a steady through line in her sculptural expression, informed by a sustained knowledge of traditional Indian and historical European sculpture, folk arts, local craft and textiles, and modern design. The diverse references that populated her imagination were never wrought prescriptively; instead she explored the divide between figuration and abstraction, fashioning unusual, mysterious, sensual and, at times, grotesque and unsettling forms of commanding presence and scale.  Marginalized and overlooked during her lifetime, Mukherjee’s singular artistic achievement received its first international outing posthumously, in the summer of 2019, in the exhibition “Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee,” at The Met Breuer, curated by Shanay Jhaveri. Photo: “Mrinalini Mukherjee During the Preparation for the Fine Arts Fair, 1969.” Jyoti Bhatt Archive Courtesy Asia Art Archive

A great patron, John C. Waddell, viewing one of the treasures he donated to the museum—in this case, a 1927 chrome-plated lamp designed by Donald Deskey—now on view in Making The Met.

With today’s reopening of The Met, the museum unveils artist Héctor Zamora’s site-specific installation Lattice Detour, commissioned by the museum for the Cantor Roof Garden. The work comprises a 101 x 11 foot wall composed of perforated terracotta bricks.   Born in Mexico in 1974, Zamora is well known for his site-specific installations that re-articulate public spaces and the built environment. With Lattice Detour, Zamora challenges and redirects our expectations of the roof garden as a social space, asking the visitor to navigate a barrier to the open view beyond. Constructed of bricks composed of Mexican earth, using local labor and traditional processes, Zamora’s lattice wall is a poetic metaphor writ large, and a critique of the social, political and economic considerations in its making. Héctor Zamora, Lattice Detour, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.