Archived - Shows And Events

This exhibition centering on a major conservation treatment by former Mellon Fellow Matthew Cushman, this Idea Lab presentation looks at a portrait of an unknown Antwerp man, painted by Anthony Van Dyck very early in the artist's career, just after his departure from Rubens's studio. Scientific research and the cleaning have revealed Van Dyck's process, including numerous changes to the costume, t...

This new exhibition of the photographer’s work revisits the artist, whose groundbreaking 1996 retrospective, “Herb Ritts: WORK,” remains one of the most popular exhibitions in MFA history. The Ritts Foundation has given the Museum a print of every image in the 1996 exhibition, and in 2007, supported the MFA’s first gallery dedicated solely to photography. Herb Ritts was a leading American fashion ...

The Museum’s exhibition marks the first time objects relating to the production of Mad Men will be shown in public on this scale. The Museum will also present An Evening with Matthew Weiner and a film series featuring movies that inspired the show, selected by Weiner. The exhibition Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men will be joined by other initiatives around New York City celebrating the series. Fridays: 1...

The Heber Bishop Collection - Heber R. Bishop's collection of carved jades was formed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum in 1902. Consisting of over one thousand pieces—primarily Chinese jades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as jades from Mughal India—it was the first major collection of its kind in the country. This exhibiti...

Nicole Eisenman’s 2010 painting Seder resonates in interesting ways with the Jewish Museum’s rich collection of portraits. These paintings detail the political and social history of Jewish identity over the past hundred years through their portrayal of individuals — from the aristocrat to the anonymous burgher to the artist. The museum’s renowned Judaica collection includes numerous seder plates, ...

In How We See, Laurie Simmons draws on the “Doll Girls” subculture of people who alter themselves with makeup, dress, and even cosmetic surgery to look like Barbie, baby dolls, and anime characters. Evoking the tradition of the high-school portrait — when teenagers present their idealized selves to the camera — Simmons photographed fashion models seated in front of a curtain, cropped from the shou...

Several themes are common to both sets of works. Some pieces explore concepts of the human body and its frailties, or the importance of human touch in the creative process. Others challenge the conformity and standardization that may be imposed by government, religious ritual, or mass culture. The peculiarities of communication and the manipulative power of language are another recurring motif. Fi...

Spanning from the mid-1960s to the present, Richard Estes: Painting New York City presents works by this quintessential New York artist and enduring leader of the Photorealist movement. Providing an unprecedented insight into the artist's creative process, the exhibition reveals a full range of Estes' paintings and works on paper, including his photographs, silkscreens and woodcuts and their vario...

After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997 presents the juxtaposition of these two historical periods in Indian art for the first time, examining Indian modern art from 1947 through the 1970s, and contemporary art from 1997 to the present. The exhibition illuminates the journey of these eight artists, examining their work from the 1950s through the 1970s, tracing their influ...

Artists: Thomas Brummett and Nine Francois - Thomas Brummett's works are part drawing, part dream and part photograph. By Manipulating the film grain by using bleaches, developing baths and brushes. Traditional wildlife photography paradoxically separates the viewer from nature while at the same time providing an illusory proximity to it. Nine Francois uses the camera lens to reverse this whole pr...