Beneath the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a dark and intimate gallery sits tucked away. It would be easy to walk quickly through this space as viewers weave their way through the encyclopedic institution, but it would also be a mistake. Through 2026, a thoughtful and moving transhistorical exhibition is enlivening this interstitial space by centering the subject of death. Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt brings together a selection of thirty collection objects addressing loss, mourning, memory, and the afterlife by contemporary artists alongside jewelry, textiles, vessels, and architectural fragments from Byzantine Egypt. Exposing its viewers to life in death, and offering a chance to sit with the precarity of human beings, Afterlives was cocurated by Andrea Meyers Achi, the Mary and Michael Jaharis associate curator of Byzantine Art, and Akili Tommasino, associate curator in modern and contemporary art. 

Cocurator Achi remarked that she has never seen so many visitors in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery (302), which opened to the public in November 2000. Over the last twenty-four years, this gallery, referred to as “the Byzantine Crypt,” has featured a rotating selection of exhibitions of Byzantine Egyptian material. On walking into Afterlives through one of the arched portals from either Gallery 301 or 300 (which both flank the Crypt), the dimly lit space requires some optical adjustment. A small plaque in the gallery explains that the lighting has been “deliberately dimmed in order to protect the centuries-old textiles on display; they are fragile and susceptible to damage from bright light.” Creating a darker, more soulful space, the lighting (while necessary for the fragility of the objects on display) is also a fitting challenge as viewers must take a moment to adjust their eyes as well as their mindsets to the different emotional and conceptual space they have entered. 

Once your eyes have adjusted, it is not immediately clear which objects in the exhibit are contemporary or which are Byzantine. In 2021, when Achi and Tommasino began collaborating on this project, they intentionally selected artwork created after 1960, such as Ana Mendieta’s Amategram series—The Vivification of the Flesh (1981), and Walid Raad’s Preface to the third edition_Acknowledgement (Coupe II) (2014), choices that queer our assumptions of what ancient or contemporary objects should look like. Raad’s Preface is a 3D-printed plaster sculpture that has been painted to mimic an ancient stone fragment to call out how Islamic artworks get transported to and from global museums amid wars in the Arab world. Preface is displayed alongside a limestone Corbel with Human Bust and Acanthus Leaves carved between 400 and 600 CE. Both Preface and the Corbel depict visages and look like they might have been sculpted in the same era. Raad uses a new technology, 3D printing, to craft an object that mimics an ancient material (limestone) and motif. In contrast, Mendieta’s Vivification of the Flesh features a gouache and acrylic painted outline of a body on an ancestral material, amate bark paper, made by the Indigenous Otomi craftspeople in Mexico. Amate paper dates to the Aztecs and as such, in painting on it, Mendieta activates a Mesoamerican cultural tradition to speak to issues of bodily sovereignty for women in the 20th century. Vivification of the Flesh is hung in dialogue with an Egyptian wool tunic dated to 660–870 CE whose faded, light brown hue resembles the amate bark. Wrapped around the deceased in death, the tunic bears visible discoloration and maintains the outlined trace of the deceased’s corporeal form. Both Vivification of the Flesh and the Egyptian tunic play subtly with the once present, now absent human body. 

Pairings like these constitute the crux of this exhibition. They are not intended to test viewers to identify what was crafted between the 4th and 7th centuries versus what was made after 1960; instead, they are a curatorial offering for contemplation. By displaying cross-temporal objects in dialogue, Achi and Tommasino collapse time, conveying the formal and conceptual eternity of fragmentation, grief, and death, thus enabling viewers to recognize their proximity to, rather than distance from, the past. 

Despite its emphasis on grief and death, Afterlives does not feel melancholic, as the artworks on view evidence the capacity for creativity and multiplicity in the wake of loss. Achi explains that the wool Decorated Tunic next to the Mendieta has had multiple lives: it was worn in life, in death, and then after its excavation collected and displayed at The Met. Considering the object’s life at the Met as an afterlife expands the ways in which the concept of life after death functions in this show. Kevin Beasley’s I.W.M.S.B. (2014) is an audio artwork that also alludes to the possibility of multiple lives after death by amplifying the haunting and distorted voices of deceased Black rappers such as Tupac, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Notorious BIG. Beasley’s work calls out the disproportionately early deaths of these musicians, demonstrating an important point that the exhibition makes: while grief and death are universal experiences, not all lives are made equally vulnerable to death. 

Another pairing, Melvin Edwards’s Ready Now Now (Lynch Fragment) (1988) and a Byzantine architectural frieze, focuses our attention on identity-based destruction. The limestone fragment features Christ with his hand extended toward twelve baskets and is dated to the 6th–7th centuries CE. The Coptic fragment was likely intentionally chipped during the Islamic period to make its sacred power inoperable through an act of iconoclasm. While iconoclasm has a complex—and not always negative—history, the violence enacted on this fragment evokes the violence against contemporary Coptic Egyptians that continues to this day. Edwards began creating his steel assemblages in 1963 to confront the violent practice of lynching Black US citizens. Ready Now Now features a protruding pickaxe and is displayed confrontationally across from the fragment of Christ. This positionality creates a connection between destruction via iconoclasm and the destruction of Black life in the US, but it also recalls the strategic and powerful use of iconoclasm by the Black Lives Matter movement in the removal of Confederate monuments which represents the upholding of white supremacist violence in the US.  

While encyclopedic institutions frequently call upon contemporary artists (often artists of color) to trouble their collection displays which maintain longstanding relations to colonial looting practices and the transatlantic slave trade, oftentimes these collaborations are temporary, and the institution does not actually invest in collecting the artist’s work. Afterlives is an antidote to this practice, as most of the objects on view are from The Met’s permanent collection. The one exception is that three editions of Everything #4 (2004) by Adrian Piper were acquired for the exhibition, and three editions were loaned. Everything #4 is a succinct work of conceptual sculpture: a small, oval, mahogany framed mirror is inscribed in gold with the phrase: “EVERYTHING WILL BE TAKEN AWAY.” As part of Afterlives, this sculpture is installed in five different galleries in The Met’s Fifth Avenue location (302, 512, 617, 726, and 917) and in Gallery 9 at The Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. Within Afterlives, Everything #4 reflects viewers’ images back to themselves, implicating each person visually in the message of the exhibition: life is precarious. In the American, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and the European Painting wings, Piper produces an act of institutional critique, calling out the potential of collections themselves to be taken away. In Gallery 512, its message of extraction hangs beside a bust of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I, who notoriously authorized the capture of Africans in what would become the transatlantic slave trade in 1564. This imperialist exploitation expanded Euro-American wealth beyond nobility and fueled art collection practices as we know them today. The juxtaposition provides a sobering chance to reflect on the relationship between aesthetics, cultural property, and violent bodily capture. Everything #4 does not redeem the institution, but like Afterlives as an exhibition, the series invites viewers to dwell in discomfort. Piper’s sculpture also inspires a gentle discomfort within The Met Cloisters. While it would have been exciting to see more than just one edition installed at the medieval satellite space, the work creates tension and resonance among the effigies of the Gothic Chapel. As one gazes into the mirror from different angles, stone tombs emerge in the mirror reflected next to one’s own face in what is a moving opportunity to recognize inevitable mortality. 

From its inception, Afterlives mobilized cross-departmental, curatorial partnership and play. For eight months prior to the exhibition’s opening, Achi and Tommasino brought collection objects into Gallery 302 and experimented with the pairings in situ. When the thirty works on view rotate four different times during the exhibit’s run, viewers will see the results of this curatorial experimentation. While future rotations remain surprises, I am certain that Achi and Tommasino’s collaboration will engender a selection of works worth viewing. If encyclopedic museums like The Met are about separation, divisions, and categorization by design, this exhibition intervenes in that system of knowledge and display. As you exit the Byzantine Crypt, you likely pause once again to adjust your eyes to the institution’s typically brighter lighting strategies. In that moment of pause, you might apply the adjusted optic that Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt required to the remainder of your visit at The Met. In this way, the exhibit opens the potential for a more productively critical mode of seeing. While Afterlives does not claim that all human lives are equally precarious, it does demonstrate that universal mortal precarity could be what binds us.