I entered the Met a bit teary-eyed today, knowing this would be my last day in the museum. I said good-bye to Diana on my way up to the last of the Modern galleries and gave my favorite reading woman a nod as I moved past her. The second floor Modern art galleries are a greatest hits of 20th century American paintings. You’ve got your Rothko; your Pollock; your Warhol; your Johns. These are familiar friends to be sure; however, the prevailing  themes that emerged for me today are connection and the circularity of time. Today, the artworks moved me in every sense of the word, into the present and the future with a deeply strong connection to the past. 

Cy Twombly’s Dutch Interior from 1962 is an homage to Joan Miró’s Dutch Interior (III) from 1928, which is an homage to any number of Dutch Interiors from the 18th century. Twombly had just moved to Rome and it has been suggested that the marks on the painting represent the graffiti and grit on the walls of the city. I loved Helen Frankenthaler’s Western Dream, in its movement a suggestion of this Monet. Dali’s Madonna made me think of Chuck Close, one of my favorite painters of all time; SFMOMA has a few. Even Charles Ray’s enormous granite sculpture relief of two horses (and apologies the linked image is the size of a postage stamp!), which has an entire gallery, just the sculpture relief and a bench, goes all the way back to ancient Greek and Assyrian art, where equine portraits were common. It makes me wonder if art is in a way like music – is there really an original song? There are a finite number of notes. And yet, so much art, and music for that matter, is profoundly original. 

The Met has been bequeathed a number of Philip Guston paintings, and is becoming a center for their study. I’m not a huge fan – I find the pink and red palette off-putting. Intellectually, I’m into it, though. The collection includes his Untitled paintings from 1980, painted toward the end of his career, a form of still lifes that he called “pile-ups” of disjointed part objects. His Sleeping from 1977 is an homage to one of his favorite paintings, Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ from 1483, which also places the feet at the bottom of the canvas creating an odd proximity with the viewer. I do quite like this earlier Guston, #5 from 1952 before he became obsessed with red and pink. 

I’m so glad I waited until today to really spend time in the Afrofuturist Period Room, entitled Before We Could Fly. After seeing so very many period rooms throughout the museum, this one hit hard. Like all of the period rooms in the Met, this one is put together meticulously, with various true-to-the-period art, furniture, and artifacts. This one, however, is entirely imaginary. The curators envisioned a Seneca Village of the future that was allowed to remain. From the exhibit notes, I was reminded that “Seneca Village—a vibrant nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants—flourished in an area just west of The Met, in what is now Central Park. By the 1850s, the village comprised some fifty homes, three churches, multiple cemeteries, a school, and many gardens. It represented both an escape from the crowded and dangerous confines of lower Manhattan and a site of opportunity, ownership, freedom, and prosperity. In 1857, to make way for the park, the city used eminent domain to seize Seneca Village land, displacing its residents and leaving only the barest traces of the community behind.” This is where afrofuturism comes in: “a transdisciplinary creative mode that centers Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination.” Some of my favorite authors are represented on this imaginary room’s shelves: Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, N.K. Jemisin. The exhibit is anchored by a large portrait entitled Andrea Motley Crabtree, the First from 2017 by Henry Taylor. Crabtree was the first woman and first Black woman to serve as a deep sea diver for the U.S. Army. The painting both honors Crabtree’s achievement and seats her as royalty in it, but also speaks to the Atlantic Sea itself as the home of sunken slave ships, in which today, teams of Black divers work to locate and memorialize the victims of slavery. Within the period room itself are two paintings by the filmmaker Tourmaline, Summer Azure and Morning Cloak, which offer speculative, utopian and bucolic portraits of queer and trans people of color whose lived experiences were anything but. 

Which brings me to Lauren Halsey’s installation on the Rooftop Garden, a commissioned work entitled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), which is an echo of an Egyptian temple, much like the Temple of Dendur on the first floor. It is flanked by four sphinxes, which bear Halsey’s face. Instead of Egyptian hieroglyphs and white explorer graffiti, the pillars are etched with references to Halsey’s South Central L.A. home and celebrations of Blackness. 

And so we have come full-circle. I began in ancient Egypt, the cradle of civilization, a little less than a month ago, and finished today, on the roof, full of joy and hope for the future.