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Opening at The Met on November 17, 2024, the major exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now will examine 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.
The exhibition is made possible by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Additional support is provided by The Hayden Family Foundation, Allison and Larry Berg, The Holly Peterson Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
“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.
