The Biggest Surprise at the Met’s Egypt Show? Live Performance

Black artists have long claimed ancient Egypt as their own. Now they’re telling their stories in person on the museum’s floor.

The artist Lorraine O’Grady once wrote of her third-grade geography teacher pulling down a map and saying, “Children, this is Africa, except Egypt — which is part of the Middle East.” Her teacher was merely repeating what archaeologists, curators and art historians had long insisted — that Egypt was more “Mediterranean” than “African,” and a precursor to the achievements of Greek and Roman civilizations. But it defied what O’Grady could see with her own eyes.

The memory, along with a trip to Cairo in the early 1960s, led O’Grady to dive into a study of the history of Egypt. Her research resulted in one of O’Grady’s first performance pieces, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline” (1980), in which she observed the almost uncanny resemblance between Queen Nefertiti’s relatives and O’Grady’s mixed-race family. Maybe Egypt and Africa weren’t as separate as Egyptologists wanted us to believe.

“Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline” and a later photo series, “Miscegenated Family Album,” based on that performance, are at the heart of a major exhibition opening Nov. 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Titled “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 — Now,” it will feature almost 200 works made largely by African American artists looking to define their cultural history after the violent legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which severed people of African origin from their roots. (That historical injustice went hand in hand with the denigration of African culture as inferior to the greatness of Europe.) For Black artists from the 19th century to today, claiming ancient Egypt as their own has been a way of asserting agency and power.

The exhibition, curated by the Met’s Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, will include painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video, along with album covers, media and fashion by artists across disciplines and generations. They include the visual artists Aaron Douglas, Loïs Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the comedian Richard Pryor; the Afrofuturist band leader Sun Ra; and the singer Solange Knowles.

To a degree unprecedented at the Met, it will also feature live performances that draw on ancient Egyptian themes. Eleven artists will present works in a “performance pyramid” embedded within the exhibition. This is not the first time the Met has incorporated performance into its galleries — Jacolby Satterwhite’s Great Hall commission in 2023 was a spectacular example. But this is the first time performance has been so interwoven in a show.