The Metropolitan Museum of Art has commissioned the sonic and visual artist Jennie C. Jones and the multidisciplinary artist Jeffrey Gibson to create new works for its exterior spaces in 2025.
Jones will create a sculptural installation for the museum’s rooftop garden, one of the most prominent commissions in New York City. Gibson, the first solo Indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, will create four sculptures for the vacant pedestals on façade of the museum’s Fifth Avenue building. Jones’s roof garden installation will be on view from 15 April 2025 until 19 October 2025; Gibson’s works will be on view from September 2025 until May 2026.
“Though stylistically different, both Jones and Gibson see the potential for beauty and form to carry the potency of individual and cultural histories,” the Met’s director and chief executive Max Hollein said in a statement.
Jones was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and works in New York’s Hudson Valley area. Her multi-work installation for the museum will investigate the ways in which stringed instruments harness the metaphysical and formal qualities of art history. Her practice uses minimalist visuals and immersive audio to comment on Black American subjectivity and culture.
Gibson, an interdisciplinary artist of Cherokee descent and member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, will present four new mixed-media sculptures depicting “ancestral spirit figures”. Gibson incorporates Native American craft traditions into his works—spanning painting, sculpture, installation and performance—that explore intersectional identity and visual legacy.
This year’s Met roof garden commission by Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj will open on 30 April, marking the artist’s first major project in the US; Korean artist Lee Bul will debut her façade sculptures on 12 September.
