The Brooklyn Rail

Starting in 1897, the Pittsburgh-born painter Henry Ossawa Tanner took several trips to the Middle East and North Africa. Tanner, the son of a bishop, spent most of his career in Paris and became famous for his biblical paintings, particularly those made following his travels. Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now borrows its title from a 1923 painting by Tanner, one of a dozen pieces depicting a subject favored by the artist. The calm, introspective blues and greens of the palette, as well as the faceless figures of Mary and Joseph as they flee Herod’s decree, are typical of his symbolist paintings. The piece is, however, a surprising entry point for an exhibition that examines Black artists’ engagement with ancient Egypt over almost one hundred and fifty years. The Egypt captured by Tanner depicts the New Testament rather than pharaonic Egypt, just as his second painting included here, Interior of a Mosque, Cairo (1897), reflects the Islamic aspects of the city. While Black artists have historically engaged with Egypt as a palimpsest with all its layered—and at times contradictory—complexity, Flight into Egypt reduces and contains this engagement in a neat, singular narrative.

By including artists across generations and media such as Robert Colescott, Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Lauren Halsey, Flight into Egypt certainly succeeds in demonstrating the almost ubiquitous—although at times inflated—presence of ancient Egypt in African American art and in doing so, presents something of a survey of its history. Moreover, the exhibition extends well beyond the fine arts, spanning a vast array of cultural production (literature, music, film, and television), religious practice and artifacts, and scholarship, and also includes a reading room and performance program. Unfolding over ten thematic sections, Flight into Egypt maps the historic interdependence of ancient Egypt and Black diasporic culture dating back to the birth of Egyptology. However, the exhibition does little to complicate this relationship, often ignoring the tensions the works themselves suggest and missing the opportunity to interrogate these complexities shaped by shifting global, often imperial forces.

Black artists have long looked to pharaonic rulers as models of Black pride and power. Works in the section “Kings and Queens” trace how artists often seek to transcribe themselves or others into this royal lineage. In Egyptian Heritage (1953), Loïs Mailou Jones embeds her self-portrait alongside an image of Nefertiti. Similarly, Lorraine O’Grady gains a family after the loss of her sister Devonia Evangeline O’Grady. The diptychs of “Miscegenated Family Album” (1980/94) combine photographs of her late sister and her family alongside reproductions of sculptures of Nefertiti and her ancestors. Oasa DuVerney titled her portrait of the Black Panther hero Assata Shakur Assata Shakur as Ahmes Nefertari (2018). And more recently, Henry Taylor’s Michelle (2023) imagines former First Lady Michelle Obama as an Egyptian queen. Simone Leigh’s imposing sculpture Sharifa (2022), depicting the writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, is reminiscent in its stance of the statues that line temples in the Valley of the Kings. However, as Aaron Douglas’s Let My People Go (ca. 1935–39) shows, this affinity is not without its complications. The 1930s oil painting captures the contradictions inherent in Black identification with the pharaohs while also supporting the enslaved Israelites. Ancient Egyptians were both powerful rulers and enslavers, a tension that similarly haunts other monotheistic interlocutors.

Many of the artists and thinkers in the exhibition had personal experiences in Egypt that may have been instigated by an interest in the pharaonic, but not exclusively so. This is especially true for those traveling there in the 1950s and ’60s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser was a prominent figure in Afro-Asian anti-imperial solidarity. It is the Arabness, and in some cases the Muslimness, of Egypt that drew figures like Malcolm X, David Graham Du Bois, and Muhammad Ali to it. However, these connections are underplayed in Flight into Egypt, superseded always by a singular vision. One is reminded of Edward Said’s observation, in an essay occasioned by the opening of the Met’s new Egyptian wing, that, “Underlying the contemporary American interest in ancient Egypt is … a persistent desire to bypass Egypt’s Arab identity.”

One small section of the exhibition, “Heritage Studies,”gestures to the continued engagement of modern and contemporary Egyptian artists with the pharaonic past. This gallery brings together early-twentieth–century pioneers (Mahmoud Saïd and Mahmoud Mokhtar) with contemporary mid-career artists (Maha Maamoun, Iman Issa, Armia Malak Khalil, and Ghada Amer) based in Cairo, New York, and/or Paris. Relying on the disclaimer that the topic is “complex and compelling enough for dedicated exhibitions and book-length studies,” Flight into Egypt offers minimal contextualization to understand how artists separated by almost a century understand their history. Alternatively, how do these artists approach ancient Egypt—through abstraction or popular culture, for example—in ways that are similar to or different from their African American counterparts? How do they use the past to imagine the future? In Egypt today, the ancient past is enlisted as part of a nationalist and racialist narrative; a neo-pharaonism, weaponized by the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was best encapsulated by the spectacle of the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade in April 2021, an hours-long broadcast during which twenty-two mummies were transferred from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square (the center of the 2011 revolution) to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization accompanied by chants in the ancient Egyptian language. Two years later, the casting of a Black actress in the Netflix series Queen Cleopatra caused a media storm with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities weighing in, endorsing a racial nationalism in the fight against Afrocentric conspiracies against Egypt. While Flight into Egypt is certainly not an exhibition about contemporary Egypt, understanding Black artists as part of a polyvalent conversation decenters the narrative as one responding exclusively to Western Egyptology. The curatorial segregation makes it difficult to make these connections.

Flight into Egypt could also have been an opportune moment to interrogate its home institution’s contribution to a particular narrativization of ancient Egypt; with a collection that dates back to 1906, the Met’s Department of Egyptian Art has played a significant role in the white-washing of this history, in all senses of the word. The Temple of Dendur arrived at the Met in the summer of 1968 after being dismantled during the construction of the Aswan High Dam (1960–70) and “gifted” to the United States by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. While several ancient temples were saved and relocated by UNESCO during this time, Nubian settlements were submerged by the reservoir of Lake Nasser/Lake Nubia. The forced displacement of Nubians had already been the consequence of successive dams constructed and heightened at Aswan since 1898. However, the preservation of ancient relics at the expense of Black lives goes unexamined in the exhibition. Moreover, before its installation at the Met, Harlem CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) had lobbied for the temple to be housed in Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that would have reflected its Africanness. The arrival of the temple resulted in a controversial expansion of the museum in the (now-repudiated) Sackler wing. Attending to these parallel histories would have allowed for rigorous engagement with nuances of ancient Egypt in a Black-American imagining and beyond.