>"What key artworks can tell us about the museum’s historical biases and what’s next for the New York institution"

This year, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art turned 150. It might have been cause for celebration, were it not for COVID-19. Instead, the museum’s leadership has looked back at its history more critically. Major new works were commissioned for the façade (Wangechi Mutu’s Afrofuturist caryatids) and the lobby (Kent Monkman’s grand history paintings of indigenous peoples), foregrounding halls filled with colonial plunder with work by artists of colour. The current exhibition ‘Making the Met: 1870–2020’, meanwhile, makes modest efforts to address the biases and omissions in the museum’s vast collection. The following seven objects, two of which appear in the anniversary show, are emblematic of the Met’s complex past, and what that past could mean for this milestone anniversary.

"What key artworks can tell us about the museum’s historical biases and what’s next for the New York institution" This year, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art turned 150. It might have been cause for celebration, were it not for COVID-19. Instead, the museum’s leadership has looked back at its history more critically. Major new works were commissioned for the façade (Wangechi Mutu’s Afrofuturist caryatids) and the lobby (Kent Monkman’s grand history paintings of indigenous peoples), foregrounding halls filled with colonial plunder with work by artists of colour. The current exhibition ‘Making the Met: 1870–2020’, meanwhile, makes modest efforts to address the biases and omissions in the museum’s vast collection. The following seven objects, two of which appear in the anniversary show, are emblematic of the Met’s complex past, and what that past could mean for this milestone anniversary.