The Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces Upcoming Exhibitions

2022-06-22

Highlights include a major presentation on the history of the kimono, a Bernd and Hilla Becher retrospective, a new commission by Hew Locke for The Met's facade, and a radical new view of Cubism

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its lineup of exhibitions for the second half of 2022, which, in keeping with its mission, will present art from around the world and across all times and cultures in the Museum's galleries. The Met also announced a number of offerings for visitors this summer, including the opening of the Cantor Roof Garden, the continuation of Date Night at The Met-with music and drink specials on Friday and Saturday evenings-and a free bicycle valet program that will begin on May 28.

"The Met's exhibition program is extraordinarily strong and varied, with everything from close examinations of the work of individual artists to large-scale thematic surveys," said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. "We are thrilled to invite audiences to the Museum to connect with deeply compelling and innovative presentations of art from the full breadth of times and cultures."

Highlights of The Met's summer exhibitions include: Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection (opening June 7, 2022), which will trace the evolution of the kimono from the late 18th through the early 20th century; Water Memories (opening June 23), exploring water's significance to Indigenous peoples and Nations in the United States through historical, modern, and contemporary artworks; Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color(opening July 5), which will present new discoveries of surviving ancient color on artworks in The Met's world-class collection with a series of reconstructions of ancient sculptures in color presented alongside original Greek and Roman works representing similar subjects; the posthumous retrospective Bernd & Hilla Becher (opening July 15), celebrating how the renowned German artists changed the course of late 20th-century photography; and, Michael Lin: Pentachrome (opening August 15), which is inspired by The Met collection and the building's architecture and will bring contemporary art to the Museum's Great Hall escalator for the first time.

The fall season will also bring a wide array of exhibitions. Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina (opening September 9) will focus on the work of African American potters in the 19th-century American South through approximately 50 ceramic objects produced at a center known for stoneware in the decades before the Civil War and present them in dialogue with contemporary artistic responses. For The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt (opening September 16), the artist will bring his singular approach-using appropriation and an aesthetic of excess-to fashion sculptures that explore the global histories of conquest, migration, and exchange. The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England (opening October 10) will trace the transformation of the arts in Tudor England through more than 100 objects-including iconic portraits, spectacular tapestries, manuscripts, sculpture, and armor-from both The Met collection and international lenders. Cubism and the Trompe l'Oeil Tradition (opening October 20) will offer a radically new view of Cubism by demonstrating its engagement with the age-old tradition of trompe l'oeil painting. In Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art(opening November 21), rarely seen masterpieces and recent discoveries trace the life cycle of the gods.

The Met'scurrent exhibition offerings include In America: An Anthology of Fashion (through September 5, 2022), the second of a two-part Costume Institute exhibition that examines the development of American fashion in the 19th to mid-late 20th century through narratives that relate to the histories of the American Wing period rooms in which they are staged. Part One, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion (also through September 5, 2022), explores a modern vocabulary of American fashion. Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast (through March 5, 2023) is the first exhibition at The Met to examine Western sculpture in relation to the histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and empire. Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents (through July 31, 2022) is the largest critical overview of the American painter's art and life in more than 25 years. In the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings produced by the iconic French-American artist, Louise Bourgeois: Paintings (through August 7, 2022) displays works made during a formative early stage of her decades-long career. Charles Ray: Figure Ground (through June 5, 2022) is a focused presentation that unites sculptures from every period of the artist's career. Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (ongoing) is a long-term installation that unsettles the very idea of a period room by embracing the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected. And in a notable first for The Met, The African Origin of Civilization (ongoing) presents masterpieces from west and central Africa alongside art from ancient Egypt.