Eliana Willis

The Egyptian gods have gathered in New York. From the falcon-headed Horus to the lioness Sakhmet, the shrouded Osiris to the cow goddess Hathor and the sky-bending Nut, these divine beings—drawn from a pantheon of more than 1,500 deities—assemble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s evocative new exhibition “Divine Egypt.” Their images, once carved in stone and cast in gold, were not mere symbols but living presences, believed to channel divine power and bridge the human and celestial worlds.
“In this exhibition, you will see about 140 works from the Met’s collection,” said the Met’s director, Max Hollein at last week’s preview. “And another 70 or so spectacular loans from institutions from across the world. Many of these works have never been displayed together. Some have never been shown in the U.S., and all of them you will see now in a completely new way.”
“Divine Egypt,” now on view through January 19, 2026, examines the visual language surrounding ancient Egypt’s gods—how artists over thousands of years shaped a visual language for the divine.
Striding Thoth 332–30 B.C. Faience The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926 (26.7.860) Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Diana Craig Patch, curator and head of the Met’s Department of Egyptian Art, led me through the exhibition. “There is much that we do not know—and perhaps can never know,” she said. “The archaeological and textual records for ancient Egypt are fragmentary and incomplete. Ancient Egyptian culture lasted for approximately 3,000 years. They occupied a river valley that was 800 miles long.”
That vast span of time and geography, she explained, fostered remarkable adaptability. “One of the defining characteristics of ancient Egyptian culture—of its divine landscape—is its flexibility,” Patch said. “Religious beliefs and practices changed over time and comprised a great diversity of local traditions. Two deities could merge, and some deities, over time, assumed the iconography of other, older, more important figures. It is this fascinating adaptability that this exhibition tries to capture through divine images represented in sculpture and relief.”
Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” on view through January 19, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met
She added that while Egypt’s monumental temples were the domain of kings and priests, most people experienced religion on a more intimate level. “The inner sanctum was for the king or the priest who acted on his behalf,” Patch said. “But people still found ways to commune with their gods—through shrines, festivals, and offerings left at temple courtyards.”
Amid this undulating cosmology, one figure stands as a rigid outlier: Ptah, the god of creation and craftsmen. When we paused before him, Patch noted how his image remained unchanged for thousands of years. Why, she wondered, did Ptah stay the same when other gods transformed? “Some gods do and some gods don’t,” she said. “If we had control over where things were found in space and time, we might have a better understanding. But so much of the archaeological record is fragmentary—it doesn’t survive complete. We found lots of new things, but not always the answers we expected. The divine landscape is complicated; it moves around. They add things over time—they never get rid of anything, which is why you have all these creation myths.”
Our tour began.
Hathor, the Cow Goddess of Love and Kingship
Carved in dark granodiorite, the head of a cow goddess stares serenely ahead, her horns curving around a sun disk. The work—once part of a full statue—radiates a quiet power, its polished surface catching light like the river itself. She is Hathor, the nurturing mother of kings, the goddess whose milk sustained divine rule.
Head of a cow goddess, New Kingdom, possibly Ramesside Period ca. 1295–1070 BCE. mage © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
Craig Patch: “Hathor—or cow—this goddess who has a whole series of manifestations; one of her manifestations is a cow that nurtures the king. The king drinks milk, which gives him power and rejuvenation. She’s protecting a very early king in front of her. But if you look carefully, nursing from her, there is Ramses. This is one of the ways the Egyptians conceptualized how the king maintains his divinity and power—it’s literally nourishment from the goddess herself.
Goddess Hathor, King Menkaure, and the Deified Hare nome, ca. 2490–2472 BCE. Image © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen.
“She can appear as a woman, a cow, or a hybrid—sometimes even as a human-headed snake. You can’t lock her into a single image. She’s a goddess of love, motherhood, music, drunkenness—so she’s complex, but always benevolent. You see her with the sun disk and horns, or in full cow form, or as the face on a sistrum, the rattle that’s used in her rituals. That’s one of the things I love about Egyptian art—it’s not about likeness, it’s about presence. The image allows the god to appear in the world. When you’re looking at Hathor nursing the king, that’s not symbolic. For them, it’s happening.”

Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” on view through January 19, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met

Ra, the Sun God and His Serpent-Slaying Mongoose
Small but uncanny, this bronze creature—a hybrid somewhere between an otter and a mongoose—embodies both mischief and cosmic purpose. Egyptians believed such animals protected the sun god Ra from the serpent Apophis, who attacked him nightly as he journeyed through the underworld.
Craig Patch: “Here’s one that everybody argues about—the little animal. Some people call it a ferret, some say it’s a weasel or a mongoose. The Egyptians didn’t worry too much about distinctions like that. Anything that ate snakes was on the side of the sun god.
“This one’s a fun one. It’s been mislabeled in the past because people said, ‘It doesn’t look Egyptian.’ By the Late and Roman periods, things get very loose. It’s not that they forgot how to do it; it’s just a different way of making things.
Statuette of an animal symbolizing Ra, Late Period–Ptolemaic Period, 664–30 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
“It’s not Greek, it’s not Roman—it’s Egyptian. But at that point, they’re doing it their own way. It’s very expressive. That’s why you get pieces like this where someone looks at it and says, ‘That can’t be Egyptian.’ But it absolutely is.
“The otter mongoose—the otter goose, as I personally call it. Yes, the raised paws are definitely otter-like, but the tail and the fur are much more mongoose-y. But the thing is, the Egyptians often weren’t fussy about identification between things that did the same thing. Mongooses and otters—long, low to the ground, dark, move fast, eat snakes and lizards. They look similar. They do the same thing. So, some places they did otters, some places they did mongooses, and eventually they didn’t get too fussy.”
What did the otter and mongoose mean to them?
Craig Patch: “They ate snakes, and snakes go after the sun god Ra—every night the sun god goes under the earth to be born the next morning. He runs into a big nasty python and has to be killed. And one of the things that kills snakes are cats. Another thing that kills snakes are mongooses and otters. So they become protection. Just like the baboon whose paws in the morning are raised to the sun became a symbol of the sun god.”
Animal Mummies, Offerings of Faith
This gallery explores how people related to deities when they couldn’t enter temples. These macabre offerings—cats, falcons, and ibises carefully wrapped in linen—were often bred by temples and sold to worshippers as votive gifts, a devotional economy built on mass sacrifice and faith.
Craig Patch: “By the end of Egyptian history, they even began mummifying animals and burying them in cemeteries dedicated to the gods. Pilgrims would buy the mummies—cats, dogs, ibises, falcons, even snakes or fish—and donate them as offerings, a way to give the god a ba and earn divine goodwill. Most of the animals were bred for this purpose, though some sacred ones lived in temples their whole lives and were mummified when they died.
Box for a cat mummy inscribed for Bastet, Late Period-Ptolemaic Period, 664–30 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
“You paid for animal mummies and they were donated to the god that you bought them for. Dogs, cats, ibises. There were a lot of different ones, Sometimes they didn’t actually wrap an animal in it. They scooped up whatever they had and wrapped it. This is beautifully done, but inside is not an ibis. It’s been x-rayed—it’s not in there. It’s a lot of loose stuff, feathers, and bone. But it’s supposed to be an ibis. It’s a symbolic ibis. They probably ran out of ibises that day. So they just put something in there. It’s the gesture that mattered—the act of giving the mummy, not necessarily what was inside.”
Statue of Anubis, ca. 1390–1352 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen.
Anubis, the Canid-Headed Guide of Souls
Craig Patch: “You come around the corner, you’re now overcoming death, which everybody had to do. And there’s Anubis, the god of embalming and who leads the dead into the next world.”
Did Anubis’s characteristics change?
Craig Patch: “Minor stuff, not major. He pretty much is a canid-headed god from the beginning. He was Khentyamentiu in the first dynasties, and Khentyamentiu seems to be absorbed later by Anubis. Khentyamentiu is shown generally as that kind of image—the reclining canid. Then he merges with Anubis and becomes a human with a canid head.”
What does the canid have to do with death?
Craig Patch: “So whatever the wild animal is that this is copied after, and it is open to discussion, but it is probably the golden wolf, the Egyptian wolf. It’s not a jackal, actually—it’s a wolf. It’s been recast genetically. It lives in the desert and is often found in cemeteries because it digs there. It also, when it finds food, will cache it in cemeteries. So it’s that association with the desert and where the dead are buried that led it to be connected. That’s what we think we understand. Again, we can never be sure. You know, falcons soar, so a sky god—choosing a falcon makes sense. A cow produces milk, nurturing the king—makes sense. Why Wadjet is a cobra in one place and a lion in another has to do with roles. But why was she a cobra to begin with? You don’t always have answers to why they chose what they did. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not.”
Statuette of a canid-headed god, probably Anubis, Ptolemaic Period, 332–30 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
Nut, the Sky Goddess Who Swallows the Sun
Before we reached the coffin showing Nut, the sky goddess, Craig Patch explained the creation story that sets the scene.
Craig Patch: “The world is all water and out of the water is all sorts of swimming things, and one of them achieves consciousness. And he swims to a rising mound of land and climbs out, and that is Atum. And as he stands on his mound, he self-creates; he uses his semen to create a son and a daughter—air and moisture. They create earth and sky and then they create the gods you most likely know: Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys.”
She continued as we stopped at the coffin.
Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” on view through January 19, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met
Craig Patch: “And this coffin shows Nut, who is the sky goddess, in two forms. This is her typical form, where she swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it in the morning.
Statue of the god Min ca. 3300 BCE The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Presented by Flinders Petrie and H. Martyn Kennard, 1894 Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Min, the God of Fertility and Creation
Craig Patch: “One of the earliest examples of monumental statuary from ancient Egypt, this is also one of the three best preserved sculptures known collectively as the Coptos Colossi. While later representations of Min are shrouded, this statue is nude except for a belt around his waist. The figure’s left hand would have grasped an erect phallus made from a separate piece of stone. This was Min’s traditional pose as a fertility god, which is imagery that lasted around 3,000 years.” More

Reviled toward the end of her life, Marie Antoinette has been revered in death. The enduring public obsession with France’s last Queen has only been fueled by the sensational nature of her death during the height of the bloodthirsty French Revolution. Items from Marie Antoinette’s deathbed, including her last writing and a guillotine blade, have gone on display at the V&A in London as part of a magnificent exhibition dedicated to her legacy as a style icon.
After marrying the future Louis XVI in 1770, Marie Antoinette became infamous for her extravagant tastes, including generous patronage of the arts and luxury sectors. But this life of carefree splendor came to an end in 1789, when revolutionaries forced the royal family to leave Versailles and return to Paris. After hostility against the old order grew, the King was eventually charged with treason and the Queen lived out her final days in prison. She was executed on October 16, 1793.
Installation view of “Marie Antoinette Style” at V&A Museum, London, U.K. Photo courtesy of V&A Museum.
The monarch’s gruesome end has titillated audiences in the centuries since. Much of this intrigue was expertly spun by French artist Anna Maria Grosholtz, much better known as Marie Tussaud. Adept at the production of waxwork likenesses of famous faces, she founded the popular Madame Tussauds tourist attraction in London in 1835.
Since the beginning, the museum’s main appeal has been its Chamber of Horrors, which once featured wax heads made from death masks of several victims of the French Revolution, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. These are said to have been modeled by Tussaud herself, who supposedly visited the Madeleine cemetery in secret to cast the ill-fated queen’s severed head, though she herself never confirmed this story. In any case, an effigy of the queen’s disembodied head went on display at Madame Tussauds in 1865 and immediately became a fan favorite, feeding Victorian England’s appetite for all things gothic. The mask was lost in a fire in 1925.
Installation view of “Marie Antoinette Style” at V&A Museum, London, U.K. Photo courtesy of V&A Museum.
Elsewhere in the Chamber of Horrors, Tussaud’s sons installed a guillotine blade from the French Revolution that they had bought from the grandson of high executioner Charles-Henri Sanson. It was exhibited for over a century with the claim that it had been used to behead Marie Antoinette, although this cannot be proven.
Some objects can be confidently connected to the queen’s final days. On view at the V&A is a plain linen chemise worn by Marie Antoinette when she arrived at Temple prison in August 1792. Compared to the lavish dresses on view, it represents her newly humble circumstances. After Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793, Marie Antoinette began wearing black in mourning.
Installation view of “Marie Antoinette Style” at V&A Museum, London, U.K. Photo courtesy of V&A Museum.
One item that likely brought the queen some comfort was a medallion containing a lock of hair from her younger son, Louis-Charles, as well as some of her own plaited hair. The dauphin’s lock was arranged beneath the word “friendship,” and the item was given by Marie Antoinette to her chamber maid Madame Campan.
On the night of August 1, 1793, the queen was transferred to the Conciergerie, where she became prisoner number 280 for 76 days. At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of her death on October 16, Marie Antoinette scrawled a final note in her prayer book. “My God, have pity on me!” she wrote. “My eyes have no more tears to cry for you my poor children; adieu, adieu!”
Marie Antoinette wore a plain chemise dress when facing the guillotine and it is said that she was bravely composed while walking up to the scaffold. She even apologized after stepping on the executioner’s foot, according to contemporary engravings that quote her. Marie Antoinette’s death was met with an eruption of chants of “long live the Republic.” It became fashionable in Paris to wear black clothing in mock mourning, even sometimes decorated with a red choker in reference to her manner of death.
“Marie Antoinette Style” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Rd, London, through March 22, 2026.  More

Touring his recently opened exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, artist Hew Locke told some visitors that a song came to mind: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” written for Nina Simone in 1964. Of course, his concern is not that of the misbehaving lover seeking forgiveness, as in the song, but rather that of an artist whose work is rich with symbolism and teeming with meaningful found objects, and who plumbs complicated histories of empire, identity, and migration—especially those that deal closely with the history of the British Empire, and are coming before American audiences.
The New Haven museum bills “Hew Locke: Passages” as the artist’s most comprehensive show to date, including 49 works spanning nearly three decades and including photography, sculpture, and drawing. On view through January, it is curated by the museum’s director, Martina Droth, who was promoted from chief curator last year. 
Hew Locke, Ambassador 4 (2022). Courtesy John Hammond.
The Guyanese British artist was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959 and moved with his family as a child to Georgetown, the coastal capital of the small South American nation of Guyana, just as the former British colony was gaining its independence. Being there as the country created its own flag and other national iconography sensitized him to the power of symbols and how closely they are linked to identity. He lived there until moving in 1980 to Britain to attend Falmouth Art School; he then earned an MFA at the Royal College of Art in London, where he still resides. 
It’s suitable that an institution devoted to British art be his ambassador in the States for this extensive presentation. But Locke will be known to art lovers on these shores from a few projects that have brought his tart historical commentary—he often says that if he hadn’t become an artist, he could have been a historian—to U.S. museums. The first was For Those in Peril On the Sea (2011), a flotilla of about 70 model boats, which came to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013, alluding to his own travels as well as to what the artist has called a “hybridization of culture.” 
Installation view of Trophy 3 for The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt (2022). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; by Anna-Marie Kellen.
New Yorkers, meanwhile, witnessed Gilt, the installation of his sculptures in the form of gilded trophies on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2022, its title punning on the “guilt” owing to the imperial acquisition of that institution’s globe-spanning holdings. And his sprawling installation The Procession (2022), commissioned by Tate Britain, was installed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2024. It features nearly 150 life-size figures, some on horseback, including drummers, soldiers and other characters, kitted out with masks and costumes, holding aloft banners and flags, ambiguously in celebration and/or protest.
How Is the Queen of England Like Bart Simpson?
One of the earliest works in the show greets visitors to the galleries: Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms), from 2004, stands some seven feet high and riffs on the U.K.’s coat of arms, which appears on the British passport.
Hew Locke, Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms) (2004). Courtesy of Hales, London and New York.
On that document, a crowned lion and a unicorn flank a shield; here, the shield has been replaced by a skeletal head wearing a crown. “People are literally dying to get this document,” Locke said during the tour. In the piece, textiles and found plastic objects, including the kinds of cheap materials schoolchildren use to make collages, are visibly stapled to a plywood backing; the Black artist self-consciously cast the symbol of Britain partly in the African colors of red, black, and green. “I use clichés deliberately,” he said.
Nearby hangs Koh-i-noor (2005), a nine-foot-high relief sculpture of the bust of Queen Elizabeth II, encrusted with hundreds of plastic objects found at markets and discount shops, including toy animals, flowers, and jewelry. Discussing British imagery such as this, not necessarily immediately recognizable to Americans, he alluded to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who said that he drew Bart Simpson in such a way that he could be recognized by his silhouette alone.
Hew Locke, Koh-i-noor (2005). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum.
Koh-i-noor is titled for what was once the world’s largest diamond, at 105.6 carats. Originating in a mine in India and long owned by Indian and Persian heads of state, it was ceded to Queen Victoria when she was named Empress of India, and is set in her crown; India, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have all demanded its return. The queen’s profile, Locke noted, still appeared on his school workbooks in Guyana even after it gained its freedom. In his sculpture, her profile bristles with sword blades, perhaps suggesting the violent colonial enterprise at whose head Elizabeth stood. 
But in an interview, Locke warned away from simplistic interpretations. “It is complicated,” he said. “It is ambivalent.” As an example, he offered King Charles: “He didn’t choose to be born to the Queen. I see decent people in difficult situations. I met the guy and I liked him.” Locke was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to art, in 2023.
Locke Was Early to Scrutinize Public Monuments
Locke’s fascination with symbols of power, and veneration of questionable figures, extended to public monuments before they came in for a reassessment in the 2010s. As early as 2005, he pitched London public arts organization Artangel on a “statue-dressing project” in which he would “dress/disguise/reveal well-known statues in central London in order to reveal/describe aspects of British culture/history/contemporary situation.” When the proposal was rejected, the artist’s mockups for the project themselves became the pieces. 
Hew Locke, Colston (2006). Courtesy Hew Locke.
Colston (2006) shows a statue devoted to 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in the English city of Bristol that would be torn down in 2020 during Black Lives Matter protests. The photo of the merchant is decorated with medals, skeletons, shells, and symbolic talismans “intended to point to the specific crimes and misdeeds of the commemorated figure,” Drost wrote in the exhibition catalogue. “Black people had to celebrate this dodgy dude,” said the artist in the gallery. 
In our interview, Locke described Colston and the other icons he treats similarly as “weighed down by the burden of history. The people are loaded down until they can barely handle any more.” Here’s more and more gold and treasure, he said; I suggested that they might as well choke on it. “Literally,” Locke agreed. “Literally.”
Hew Locke, Saturn (2007). Courtesy Hew Locke.
In early days, Locke’s colorful works were seen as “exotic”; people would ask him if they were created for festivals, and, in his view, overly linked them to his Black identity. He went to the other extreme in the late 1990s, working only in black and white. But by the time he created Saturn (2007), he was insisting on his own presence in his work; these towering studio photographs show the artist, his eyes barely visible, encrusted with the same kind of finery that Colston and others choked on. In Saturn, he is encrusted with flowers and the heads of baby dolls, and holds a scepter. All around him appear the words honi soit qui mal y pense, the old-French motto of a British knightly order, usually translated as “shame on anyone who thinks evil of it”; that slogan, too, appears on the British coat of arms.
In that piece, Locke’s head is backed by the silhouette of the queen, recalling Groening’s Bart Simpson quip, but perhaps needing translation for U.S viewers. In our interview, Locke described a moment during a county fair that, for him, drove home the legibility of national symbols. A man representing a bird sanctuary had brought a specimen. “The feathers weren’t so good,” the artist noted before realizing it was a bald eagle. The moment the animal spread his wings, Locke said, its symbolism came crashing down on him: “It’s America!”
Sailing Into the Future
In other pieces, like the watercolor Guyana House Boat (2018), Locke looks to his other home country, to which he periodically returns, for inspiration.
Hew Locke, Guyana House Boat 4 (2018). Courtesy Hew Locke.
The country’s name, he pointed out in the gallery, comes from an indigenous language and means “land of many waters.” In an era of rampant sea level rise, that’s not always a blessing: its capital, Georgetown, where Locke lived, is about six feet below sea level, and the country suffers regular flooding, so the notion of putting a Guyanese home in a kind of ark resonates not only with travel, migration, and cultural hybridization, but also with dire environmental threats.
Sculptures by Hew Locke hang in the lobby of the Yale Center for British Art. Photo: Brian Boucher.
Entering and leaving the museum’s imposing building, designed by renowned architect Louis I. Kahn, the visitor encounters a small assembly of sculptures of boats, hanging from the ceiling of the atrium, a few feet above the floor. Desire (2018), The Survivor (2022), and The Relic (2022) bring the house boat drawing into three dimensions, and evoke his earlier, larger flotilla, For Those in Peril On the Sea (2011), even as it also evokes migration, sea level rise, Britain’s maritime history, and the Middle Passage. All sailing in the same direction, they also echo the ambiguous parade of Procession (2022); while the cause being celebrated and protested there is ambiguous, the artist once described the figures as all headed “into the future.”
The future may look no better than the complicated, violent past that Locke explores. But, like it or not, into the future we all sail together.
“Hew Locke: Passages” is on view at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut, through January 11, 2026. It will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts, 1971 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio, where it will be on view February 13-May 24, 2026, and to the Museum of Fine Arts, 1001 Bissonnet St, Houston, Texas, where it will be on view June 21–September 13, 2026.  More

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently home to a guerrilla art project featuring the work of 17 Native artists. The unsanctioned augmented reality exhibition, “Encoded,” was launched by nonprofit media and design lab Amplifier on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, taking over the institution’s American Wing.
Each of the artists has remade existing works from American art history in the Met collection, bringing the Native point of view into galleries long dominated by the perspective of European settlers and their descendants.
“Amplifier wanted to open up an opportunity for more dialogue and discussion about why for so long have Indigenous peoples have not been more integrated into these collections that are in these giant institutions,” exhibition curator Tracy Renée Rector told me.
You can see (and hear) the show’s 25 altered masterpieces on your iPad or smartphone when you are at the museum. Representatives from Amplifier are also on hand to distribute exhibition guides and even offer tours of the show, which runs through the end of the year.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Midéegaadi: Fire (2021-ongoing), overlaid on Thomas Cole, View on the Catskills – Early Autumn (1836-37). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
A New Take on Well-Known Works
The first work in the show can actually be seen outside the museum, with a larger-than-life Indigenous dancer in colorful traditional garb, by Skawannati, looming over the Met façade. Inside, video work like Midéegaadi by Cannupa Hanska Luger, continues inside, dancing across paintings like Thomas Cole’s View on the Catskills – Early Autumn (1836–37).
“The works that I’m presenting are an intervention on a narrative that American art has maintained, which is that the landscape of North America was void of population,” Luger said in a video for Amplifier. “I wanted to present work that brought the living things that existed on the landscape before America was America.”

In the galleries, some of the Met’s most famous works are included in the show, such as The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer. Open up the “Encoded” website, and the work’s imperiled Black sailor is joined by a black and white figure dancing to a Tlingit song from a 2006 Nicholas Galanin video, Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan I.
The artist also contributed an AR version of his work Never Forget, planting a sign reading “Indian Land” in white capital letters across the verdant landscape of Valley of Wyoming (1865) by Jasper Francis Cropsey. The work is inspired by the original Hollywood sign, which said “Hollywoodland.” Galanin first installed a physical version in California’s Coachella Valley for the 2021 edition of the Desert X public art biennial.

Other works recontextualized by “Encoded” include the monumental Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) by Emanuel Leutze. Viewed through the lens of the exhibition, the Continental Army has become engulfed in vegetation, plants weighing down the boat as it traverses the river. The new piece, by the artist Flechas, is titled LANDBACK.
“The piece is talking about our connection to the natural world.
It is not separate but integrated,” Rector said. “We can’t not acknowledge the earth that holds these stories.”
Flechas, LANDBACK (2025), overlaid on Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
A High-Tech Project in a Hurry
Though the show has been in the works for four years, Rector didn’t come on board until July, when an anonymous Indigenous donor provided the funds to finally bring Amplifier’s high-tech vision to life. She had roughly a month to put together the artist list, which she wanted to make sure represented the diversity of Native artists across North America, or Turtle Island, as it is called by some Indigenous people.
“The artists had to turn something around really fast. Some of the artists had pieces ready to go that were immersive for digital technology, and others we supported with technical assistance,” Rector said. “I wanted to be sure to express that Indigenous creatives are dynamic and also have been using technology since time immemorial, from pottery work, weaving, and embroidery
to digital technology. So the exhibition
highlights both traditional forms of art and technology and contemporary forms.”
She was also excited that the exhibition was unsanctioned: “What does it mean to take up space? What does it mean to show up authentically?
What does it mean to work outside of systems?”
Nicholas Galanin, NEVER FORGET Valley of Wyoming (2021) overlaid on Jasper Francis Cropsey, Valley of Wyoming (1865). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
The Met has been making a concerted effort to feature the work of Native artists in recent years. In 2018, the museum displayed Indigenous art in its American Wing for the first time, with “Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection.” It followed up by creating a new Indigenous art program and hired Patricia Marroquin Norby as its first curator of Native American art.
The museum even commissioned a pair of monumental history paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman for its series of contemporary “activations,” one of which recast Washington Crossing the Delaware with his Two Spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. (Rector originally wanted an animated version of Monkman’s work, which debuted in 2020, for “Encoded.”)
And just last month, Jeffrey Gibson became the first Indigenous artist to create sculptures for the niches of the museum’s Fifth Avenue façade, with the installation of the commission The Animal That Therefore I Am.
Mer Young, We’wah Lhamana (2025) overlaid on Childe Hassam, Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain (1918). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
But as “Encoded” illustrates, there is still plenty of room to add Indigenous voices to the museum’s displays. A 2019 project, for instance, called “Native Perspectives,” added labels written by Native artists and historians to 18th- and 19th-century paintings and sculptures depicting Indigenous subjects—but those texts are no longer on display in the Met galleries.
The museum did not respond to my request for comment about the unsanctioned exhibition or future plans for its Indigenous art program.
“The Met has not issued any formal response,” Amplifier executive director Cleo Barnett told me in an email. “A researcher from the American Wing approached us yesterday at the Met expressing genuine interest in the project, but we haven’t received any official communication from the institution itself.
Acosia Red Elk at “Encoded” with Josué Rivas, Standing Strong featuring Acosia Red Elk (2021)over Thomas Sully, Queen Victoria (1838). Photo: by Aaron Huey, courtesy of Amplifer.
A Meaningful Moment
Many of the loved ones of the “Encoded” artists—who include Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Jarrette Werk, Josué Rivas, Katsitsionni Fox, and Mer Young—were at the museum for the show’s opening day.
“Watching family members see their relatives depicted or witnessing their own faces light up when they see their own cultural symbols reflected back at them at the exhibition, brought so many tears of joy,” Rector said.
Cass Gardiner, Skoden Warriors (2025) atop Jerome B. Thompson, The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain (1858). Photo: courtesy of Amplified.
The exhibition was also inspiring reflection from museum goers encountering the AR artworks, such as Cass Gardiner’s Skoden Warriors (2025). It overlays 8-bit Native American figures that recall Oregon Trail video game characters atop Jerome B. Thompson’s The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain (1858), of a group of white people picnicking atop a mountain. “Look at these guys, acting like they discovered the place,” a speech bubble pops up.
“Many people recognized the educational game from school and were curious to understand more from Cass Gardiner’s perspective about what colonization means, and what the actual impact of westward expansion is from an Indigenous point of view,” Rector said.
Priscilla Dobler Dzul, Future Cosmologies: The Regeneration of Maya Mythologies (2023), overlaid on Thomas Crawford, Mexican Girl Dying (1846; carved 1848). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
An especially moving work is Priscilla Dobler Dzul’s response to Thomas Crawford’s marble sculpture Mexican Girl Dying (1848). The original work fits into the trope of the extinction of the Native American people, romanticizing the death of young woman, shown topless. Dzul’s piece Future Cosmologies: The Regeneration of Maya Mythologies (2023) tenderly covers the woman’s bare breasts with a blanket made from the skin of a wild mountain lion.
“Priscilla’s work honors the many Indigenous lives lost to colonization in Mexico, but also uplifts the cosmologies and vitality of the people, while honoring the ancestors as well,” Rector said.

The project is not just about mourning what has been lost in the centuries since colonization began. It is also a celebration of Indigenous life and culture, and their continued presence here not only in the Met, but across the continent.
“The exhibit is gorgeous and fun,” Rector added. “I think it’s a beautiful addition to the Met, if they are open to incorporating it into their conversations about the work there.”
“Encoded” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, October 13–December 31, 2025. More

Come fall, London’s art enthusiasts eagerly await the unveiling of Tate Modern’s annual Turbine Hall commission–a rare chance for a contemporary art star to work on a truly monumental scale, filling the museum’s cavernous central exhibition hall. In recent memory, Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui wowed audiences with the sheer scale of his cascading bottle caps. Last year, Mire Lee’s grotesque body-horror contraptions divided opinion. But the response to this year’s much subtler installation by Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara has been comparatively muted.
Decreed “tame” by the critics, Goavve-Geabbil does not stun or surprise like its predecessors. Instead, it asks of us a more intimate engagement. In return, Sara promises to open our eyes to a different way of life, one in which humans hold sacred their interdependent relationship with nature. These are the lessons of Sámi philosophy, developed over centuries by people Indigenous to the Sápmi region, which stretches across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
“You are activating a whole philosophy, a different way of being,” said Sara during a press conference at Tate Modern on Monday morning. “You have to connect spiritually, to awaken a different knowledge apparatus that lives in your body, when you live with animals in this close co-existence.”
Installation view of “Hyundai Commission: Maret Anne Sara” in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, 2025. Photo: Larina Fernandez, © Tate.
Rendering Reverence
Goavve-Geabbil has two parts. The standout piece at the back, titled Geabbil, invites audiences to wander through a maze-like structure of simple wooden fences that, in four places, spiral inwards to reveal a circular nook of fur-lined seats dotted with headphones. Sara is descended from a Sámi reindeer herding family and the viewer can tune into her personal account of learning to care for and revere the animal. This pact between man and beast also involves the latter’s slaughter, a sacrifice honored by the careful use of its entire being, from bones to fur and meat. As such, skulls decorate Sara’s structure.
“The beauty is what you can make out of them, how you can give them a new life,” said Sara.
Seen from above, on the Turbine Hall’s bridge, Geabbil‘s swirling forms mimic those found inside a reindeer’s nose. This astonishing labyrinth is a feat of biological engineering with the ability to heat each new breath of air by 175°F, allowing reindeer to survive the extreme cold. By magnifying these forms until they dwarf us, Sara emphasizes our humble position within nature’s sprawling systems, whether we care to acknowledge it or not.
Portrait of Máret Ánne Sara at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, 2025. Photo: Sonal Bakrania. © Tate.
“Your experience is of bodily inferiority, entering this universe of natural intelligence embedded with Indigenous science,” explained Sara. “It’s so big you might lose your direction at certain points. A modern human with modern rationality believes they can rule over nature but from the Sámi perspective we are equal to everything.”
Other references to the herding tradition include “reindeer earmarks,” distinctive markings that are passed down generations, carved into the fence’s poles. Further immersing the attentive viewer is a layered scent and soundscape that includes recordings from the Sápmi landscape and examples of joik, a form of Sámi song that can serve as a channel for communion with the elements of our world.
Climate Focus
The work’s second part, Goavve, towers over the viewer, reaching up over 90 feet to the ceiling. Its column of reindeer hides tautly stretched by electrical power cables is a memorial to reindeer lives lost to climate change. Sudden temperature fluctuations are disorientating and can also prevent animals from accessing crucial food sources. The cables also refer to the ongoing exploitation of Sápmi lands through mining activities, which not only destroys habitats and displaces communities, but risks diminishing age-old ancestral practices.
“I work very consciously with materials in terms of the power they bear,” said Sara. “The hides carry a very strong life energy and spirit within them.” Tied up by cables for Goavve, they become “a symbol of life trapped within the mechanisms of capitalism and extractivism.”
Installation view of “Hyundai Commission: Maret Anne Sara” in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, 2025. Photo: Yili Liu, © Tate.
Sara has long sought to raise awareness of issues facing the Sámi people thorough her art. The most notable example is Pile O’Sápmi, which she made in response to Norway’s order that her brother cull part of his livestock. While he launched an unsuccessful legal challenge, she created vast sculptural works out of reindeer skulls. By referring to a famous historical photograph in which men stand on a mountainous pile of bison skulls, the works’ title forges a link between the Sámi plight and those of other Indigenous communities across the world. Bison were hunted to near extinction by European settlers as a means of depriving Native Americans of a vital life force.
At the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, Sara converted the Nordic Pavilion into the Sámi Pavilion, where she placed the corpse of a reindeer calf within a swirling cocoon of hanging birch branches to make a mobile. Other sculptural works were made of reindeer intestines, referring to the emotional “gut” knowledge that belongs to all living beings. It is this infusion of Sámi philosophy that prevents Sara’s work from ever feeling morbid. Rather, it is a unique, multi-sensory celebration of all life.
“Hyundai Commission: Máret Ánne Sara: Goavve-Geabbil” is on view at Tate Modern, London until April 6, 2026.  More

Though she is nearing 80 years old, legendary performance artist Marina Abramović has no plans to slow down. In fact, this month she is set to premiere what she believes is her “most ambitious” performance yet for Factory International in Manchester. Balkan Erotic Epic is a contemporary take on ancient traditions that explores the tension between spirituality and sexuality, one that features no less than 70 performers.
Though little has yet been revealed about the highly-anticipated show, Abramović has released behind-the-scenes images from rehearsals.
From Marina Abramović’s Balk Erotic Epic (2025) for Factory International in Manchester. Photo: © Marco Anelli.
Born in former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, in 1946, Abramović has drawn on her Balkan heritage to re-examine ancient folkloric rituals and beliefs in a mega four-hour, 13-part performance of dance and live music. But the epic doesn’t stop at elaborate costumes and complex choreographies; further pre-filmed scenes will be transmitted via surrounding screens. Throughout, we will come to understand the erotic not as something taboo but as an energizing life source.
Audiences are free to navigate the space as they wish, but are warned that performances may turn “intimate” or “feverish,” with graphic scenes, full nudity, and simulated acts. If this sounds potentially uncomfortable, that’s the point. Abramović is staying true to form in confronting viewers with the full scope and intensity of human experience. Over four hours, it may even feel like something of an assault on the senses.
Rehearsal of “Tito’s Funeral” from Marina Abramović’s Balk Erotic Epic (2025) for Factory International in Manchester. Photo: © Marco Anelli.
“Through this project, I would like to show poetry, desperation, pain, hope, suffering, and reflect our own mortality,” the artist said. She is certainly no stranger to grueling performances designed to push her to her limits. These include having a bow and arrow aimed at her heart, passing out as she lay at the center of a burning star-shaped wooden frame, and walking halfway along the Great Wall of China to meet, and break up, with her ex-partner Ulay.
“In our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography,” she added. “This gives me a chance to go back to my Slavic roots and culture, look back to ancient rituals and deal with sexuality, in relationship to the universe and the unanswered questions of our existence.”
Rehearsal of “Orgy” from Marina Abramović’s Balk Erotic Epic (2025) for Factory International in Manchester. Photo: © Marco Anelli.
No mean feat! And one that will be achieved by all manner of acts, from a giant orgy to dancing skeletons and a “mushroom garden” populated by fake phalluses. The reasoning behind this flagrant lack of modesty is Abramović’s finding that, in Balkan culture, many rituals have centered around genitalia. It was a topic that first began to interest her during the making of her 2005 film Balkan Erotic, which similarly focuses on ceremonial acts performed in the nude.
Some of the traditional rites that are being revived include the dressing of a naked corpse, men penetrating the soil to improve its fertility, and a pregnant woman being soaked in milk. These scenes will, Abramović believes, connect us to the history of humanity, revealing to us the same hopes and anxieties that we feel today.
Research of “Tito’s Funeral” from Marina Abramović’s Balk Erotic Epic (2025) for Factory International in Manchester. Photo: © Marco Anelli.
Though she has long been one of the art world’s most talked about celebrities, Marina Abramović is having something of a moment this fall. Just last week, she threw a well-attended rave at Saatchi Yates in central London that had queues curling around the block. A sweeping retrospective has just opened at the Albertina in Vienna and a second was recently announced by the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, set to run during next year’s Biennale. Abramović is the first living woman artist to receive the honor.
“Balkan Erotic Epic” is on view at Aviva Studios, Aviva Studios, Water St, Manchester, through October 19, followed by an international tour.  More