Andrea Myers Achi
Andrea Myers Achi is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has organized and co-organized a series of groundbreaking exhibitions, including Afterlives: Modern Art in The Byzantine Crypt (2024–2027). She holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine Art History and Archaeology (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), two master’s degrees in Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Studies and Art History and Archaeology (NYU), and a BA from Barnard College.
June 2025Critics Page
Jack Whitten and Byzantium: Mosaic, Memory, and the Material Language of Abstraction
Jack Whitten’s tesserae paintings, developed during the final decades of his life, offer a profound meditation on lineage and the persistence of material traditions. Much like Byzantine mosaicists, who assembled fragments of gold and glass to craft luminous images, Whitten’s labor-intensive process of slicing, composing, and layering acrylic tesserae articulates a non-linear history shaped by fragmentation, survival, and renewal.
