A major exhibition focused on the influence of ancient Egypt on Black artists across disciplines opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this past November. Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now occupies one large gallery on the museum’s second floor with nearly two hundred works. One artwork pictured prominently in the exhibition’s promotional material—perhaps most emblematic of the show’s conceptual thrust—is Fred Wilson’s Grey Area (Brown Version). Wilson’s sculpture features a set of five plaster effigies of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. The busts are identical save for their coats of paint, with gradations from a light beige to a dark brown colour. Wilson, an American conceptual artist born in 1954, is renowned for his process of altering found objects or readymades to challenge the status quo surrounding history, culture and race within art institutions. Grey Area (Brown Version) uses the simple hue shift to direct attention towards the question of the ancient Egyptians’ racial identity. Which of these five portraits most accurately represents the skin colour of a royal who reigned over three millennia ago? Who, then, can lay claim to the trove of enduring significance that ancient Egypt represents in today’s culture? Reduced into a rather narrow range of discrete shades, Wilson’s sculptures toy with a historic obsession of defining and valuing art and artefacts along modern racial lines.

The exhibition, organised by the Met’s Modern and Contemporary Art curator Akili Tommasino, doesn’t concern itself with an empirical argument for one prevailing racial identity within ancient Egypt, which was a diverse, multiethnic society shaped by successive waves of migration and populated by people with a range of skin colours. Instead, the exhibition begins by reckoning with the early identification of ancient Egypt as a proto-European society through what American abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1887 referred to as the “color line”, related to practices that gatekeep Black scholars in American society. The first of 10 thematic sections in Flight into Egypt focuses on the period when archaeological developments gave way to academic and institutional interest in ancient Egypt. Featuring books, archival photographs and letters, the section traces Egyptology from the 1700s through the early 20th century while highlighting the Black scholarship that emerged in response to Eurocentric conceptions of ancient Egypt and the ways they were segregated from a broader institutional study of Egypt.

One particularly illuminating inclusion in the exhibition’s first section is a 1932 letter from Dows Dunham—the former head of the Department of Egyptian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—to William Leo Hansberry, a Harvard-trained scholar who went on to found the African Civilisations course at Howard University. The letter discourages Hansberry from joining an Egyptological expedition to northern Sudan on grounds of his race. The story of a racially divided cultural consciousness surrounding the subject provides the dialectic tension that unleashes the exhibition’s successive sections, which explore the manifold ways Black artists have engaged with ancient Egypt into the present day, carving out their own spaces in its legendary imagery.

The remainder of Flight into Egypt takes on a vivacious, celebratory and occasionally playful tone. The prominence of royal imagery meshes well with the exhibition’s star-studded walls: various sections feature paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, photographs of the American professional boxer Mike Tyson and his wife Kiki Tyson in Giza and ephemera from famous musicians including Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane and Beyoncé Knowles. Spanning over a century, from the Harlem Renaissance into contemporary abstractions, recurring symbols of pyramids, sphinxes, ankhs, pharaohs and more illustrate the lasting power of ancient Egyptian aesthetics on Black artistry. Gathered together, these appear as a powerful device for crafting a unique identity that unifies an otherwise heterogeneous collection of work. The exhibition also includes several components that imbue the space with an interactive or immersive appeal. Alpha’s Bet is Not Over Yet, an installation by Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, functions as a reading room and discussion space with a selection of historically radical and independent Black American publications, free to browse and read at several large tables in the centre of the gallery. Another space is devoted to a sound and light installation by Awol Erizku, including a spinning disco bust of Nefertiti and screened excerpts of Beyoncé’s award-winning documentary film Homecoming (2019). Additionally, one gallery hosts the Performance Pyramid, featuring documentation of historical works of performance art inspired by ancient Egyptian themes, as well as ongoing live restagings and presentations of new works in dance, drama and music.

It is significant that Flight into Egypt is staged in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has been home to a collection of nearly thirty thousand Egyptian artefacts since the 20th century. A foundational portion of objects in The Met’s massive Egyptian Art wing originated from the museum’s archaeological projects, which carried out excavations at prominent locations such as Lisht and Thebes between 1906 and 1935 in response to the era’s burgeoning interest in ancient Egypt. Flight into Egypt, housed in an opposite corner of the sprawling museum, bears little resemblance to its permanent installation counterpart: yet it presents as a meaningful contemporaneous echo. With this exhibition, The Met’s connection of art objects separated by thousands of years reads as a testament to the scale and endurance of art history’s impact. This celebration of ancient Egypt as it appears in Black artistry offers a context that balances its study towards a more truthful “grey area”.

‘Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now’ is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until 17 February, 2025.