On Thursday the museum announced two site-specific commissions from contemporary artists Wangechi Mutu and Kent Monkman. A third contemporary artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, will also debut a new seven-channel video installation at the Met this spring.
“If you take all of them together, it is clearly a statement that shows the Met, in it’s main building, engages with contemporary art and contemporary artists in a way that is bold but also playful,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director, in an interview. Playful, for Hollein, means “using the building itself and some of our more public spaces as areas of intervention, engagement and interaction with the audience.”
On May 30, the Robert Lehman Wing atrium will host the world premiere of Kjartansson’s “Death Is Elsewhere.” Hollein said the Icelandic artist’s installation will weave together “music, poetry, intimacy and landscape into a fully immersive environment.”
Mutu, a Kenyan-American artist known for her sculpture, film and performance work, will create a collection of sculptures for the niches in the museum’s facade. This will be the first time that art has been displayed on Richard Morris Hunt’s 1902 facade. The sculptures will be on view from Sept. 9 to Jan 12, 2020.
Hollein said the plan is for Mutu’s installation to be just the first iteration of an annual facade project by a notable contemporary artist.
The second commission, multiple large paintings by Kent Monkman made for the Met’s Great Hall, will be unveiled on Dec. 19. Sheena Wagstaff, chairman for modern and contemporary art at the Met, said that Monkman’s works will “deal with that sense of arrival that any visitor has when they step over the threshold and into the Great Hall.”
Hollein said the commissions and Kjartansson’s piece could be seen as a “counter argument” to the notion that the closing of the Met Breuer is a sign that the Met is decreasing its engagement with contemporary art. But he said that the exhibitions were part of the museum’s long-standing commitment to the field, not something created to address this perception.
Wagstaff echoed Hollein, saying: “This is just the beginning. There will be more to come, different types of responses and possibly different spaces too.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.