How has Ancient Egypt entered the art of black artists over the past 150 years? An exhibition at the Metropolitan

From Nov. 17, 2024, to Feb. 17, 2025, the Metropolitan Museum in New York presents the exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now, curated by Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, which aims to examine how black artists engaged withAncient Egypt through visual, sculptural, literary, musical, scientific, scholarly, religious, political, and performance works. Nearly 200 works of art from the Metropolitan’s collection and from public and private collections, including loans from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Europe to explore nearly 150 years of artistic and cultural production. Thematic sections will trace how black artists used the imagery of Ancient Egypt to create aunifying identity and examine the contributions of black scholars to the study of Ancient Egypt.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, black Americans began to look to Ancient Egypt as evidence of an undeniably great ancient African culture to ennoble black identities, having been systematically deprived of any knowledge of the specific African heritage through the transatlantic slave trade, generational slavery, and dehumanization in American civic life and society. This exhibition aims to illustrate how modern Black artists have affirmed affinities with Ancient Egypt from the late 19th century to the flowering of Afrocentric visual art during the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and to the artistic trends of the following decades, to the present day.

The exhibition will feature both well-known and emerging artists, new works and works new to the Met’s collection, while also reintroducing rarely exhibited artworks.

The following are the names of the artists featured in the exhibition with their works: 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.

For the first time at the Metropoltan Museum, the 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 present a documentary history of black performance art enlivened by Ancient Egyptian themes and will serve as a venue for live performances on selected days throughout the duration of the exhibition.

“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 that exists outside the museum walls and in everyday life,” said Max Hollein, French Director and CEO of the Met’s Marina Kellen. “Unprecedented in scope, the exhibition amply illustrates the many ways Black artists and cultural figures see Ancient Egypt as a point of reference, inspiration and connection. Our hope is that it will foster and deepen the exploration of this topic.”

“This is the modern story of how an ancient civilization became a source of inspiration for black creatives to create a unifying identity after generations in which it was underrepresented and undervalued,” said Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. “This is an exhibition that only the Met can achieve by drawing inspiration from its collection that dates back 5,000 years and connecting it to the present and our communities in New York City and beyond.”

"The exhibition takes its title from the Met’s painting Escape to Egypt (1923), an emblem of timeless transience and creativity by expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first internationally recognized African American painter, who traveled to Egypt in 1897, and includes recent works such as Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich’s 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 of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met and curator of the exhibition."Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 - Now challenges Eurocentric constructs of Ancient Egypt, offering a broader history that celebrates the contributions of cultural figures of African descent."

Image: Fred Wilson, Grey Area (brown version) (1993; Brooklyn Museum, bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr. and bequest of Richard J. Kempe, by exchange)

How has Ancient Egypt entered the art of black artists over the past 150 years? An exhibition at the Metropolitan

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