The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 126
The Petrified, 2022—

Text, watercolors, future elements


A shriek pierces the halls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. An elderly woman buckles over. People race towards her—then stop. She has utterly transformed, closer in appearance to the Neoclassical statues on view than to a living, breathing human. Not white, but somehow calcified. Speckled with bits of color. Nobody understands what they’re seeing, but they sense that this isn’t a medical issue. Something else has taken place.

The Petrified is an episodic work that begins with this fictional event in the summer of 2009, telling stories of the people who turned to stone over the ensuing ten years, and how museums adapted to their presence. Mixing literary reportage, watercolor, and other media, it draws on recent events and debates pertaining to cultural restitution and repatriation; the private financing of museums; and the politics of collecting and conserving. 

A question drives this project: Does the ‘global museum’ continue to have currency, when much of what’s collected has practical import and even animacy for certain communities? The petrification of people, seen in this light, suggests that we confer too much power on this institution. Culture can be preserved but must also be practiced and lived. 


Read:
Part 1, published in e-flux journal #125
Part 2, published in e-flux journal #126


View Watercolors:
The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 126
Getty Center, Museum South Pavilion, Gallery S203
The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 131
The British Museum, Room 50