Composer Shawn Okpebholo and Duke University professor Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji bring individual stories to life through song.

Join featured artists and the curator of the exhibitions “Water Memories” and “Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection” for a conversation exploring the significance of water to diverse Indigenous peoples and Nations in the United States, as expressed through historical, modern, and contemporary art. Delve into the artists’ artistic processes while examining the ongoing work to protect water and land, aesthetic activism, and the unique challenges contemporary Indigenous artist-activists face.

In her fifth and final performance as 2021-2022 MetLiveArts Artist in Residence, the incomparable choreographer and dancer Bijayini Satpathy built on her prior explorations of movement and art with an evening-length performance for the stage of the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The new work, entitled “Dohā,” navigates the relationship between prayer and play, moving away from the Odissi dance form’s customary theistic depictions to highlight the bhāva—emotional experience—of prayer as an embodied human act. Within the discipline of ritualized prayer, Satpathy embraces play and playfulness as an essential part of the individual’s search for the divine.

In “Naino,” a courtyard within a scholar’s garden in the city of Suzhou, China inspires a narrative exploration of a poem by Kabir, a 15th-century Indian mystic claimed by both Hindu and Islamic traditions. The poem is worldly and spiritual as it employs intimate, erotic speech that is typical to both the Sufi way of Islam and the Bhakti tradition of Hinduism. The speaker invites the beloved into their eyes, and from there into their inner landscape. The ideal here is to become one with the divine by taking in its magnificent vision.

MetLiveArts 2021–22 Artist in Residence Bijayini Satpathy’s performance is set against Sam Gilliam’s chromatically striking and texturally dynamic drape painting Carousel State (1968).

Join Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, on a tour of the exhibition "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty."

Go behind the scenes with artist Lauren Halsey, who discusses the inspiration and making of The Met’s 2023 Roof Garden Commission.

“Taru” is Sanskrit for tree. Inspired by non-figurative ornamentation and the interlacing of simple geometrical patterns in Islamic art, this performance is an abstract exploration of the body as it creates and becomes design in space. The piece is set to a tarana—a musical pattern from the north Indian Hindustani style of music that is highly influenced by Persian music traditions.