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Throughout her art career, Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962) has explored the pressures of identification and stereotypes in her representations of female figures, challenging viewers with images that prompt internal reckonings with their own perceptions of gender, class, and status. The exhibition Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, the first comprehensive museum presentation of Yuskavage’s works on paper, reveals the extensive range of Yuskavage’s experimentation with process and material in drawings produced from the early nineties to the present.

In 2024 the Morgan celebrated 100 years of being a public institution, and many of the museum’s supporters honored that event by donating works of art to the collection. For the exhibition, A Celebration: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan’s Centennial, each curatorial department (except Ancient Western Asian Seals & Tablets, which is not currently acquiring material) selected about ten to twelve gifts and promised gifts made to commemorate the anniversary.

Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn was born in 1949 in Manila, Philippines. Since moving to the States in 1963, she is often referred to in scholarship as an American playwright, writer, and poet. My take: by commanding language and blurring the boundaries of national and artistic categorizations in her work, Hagedorn weaves together investigations of life and culture through exploratory multimedia performance art.

Amidst the soft ambiance of the North Room, formerly Belle da Costa Greene’s office, the ancient western Asian cylinder seals stand as witnesses to history. Each seal is a window into the past, revealing the sophisticated artistry and profound symbolism cherished by the people of Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers.

On the front page of La Nation on April 15, 1896, Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), the famous Parisian dealer in Japanese fine and decorative arts, was described by an anonymous critic as a man with foresight—a man driven by the desire to demonstrate the value of the overlooked and undiscovered.

In the late eighteenth century, the Swiss dealer Peter Birmann assembled a monumental album of 475 miniatures, which he had removed from illuminated manuscripts. Named after the man to whom he sold the album, Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt (1752–1819), it remained in private hands for nearly two hundred years.

There’s an old adage in the theater that says plays are not written, they are rewritten. For most of the twentieth century that rewriting happened on the road during two-week stints known as tryouts. These trial runs, in cities like Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, gave new productions time away from the critical spotlight to get their acts together and avoid landing belly-up on Broadway.

Belle da Costa Greene achieved unparalleled status as a library director, collector, and curator during her lifetime. As scholars continue to uncover the complex layers of Greene’s life, two main aspects have risen to the forefront of her legacy—her position as the personal librarian of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, along with the luxuries and challenges this position provided, and her Black ancestry, complicated as it was by her decision to pass as white.

This essay serves as an expansion on the fall 2024 installation in the Rotunda that displays materials from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The objects on view provide a glimpse into the intersecting worlds of astrology, politics, and abolition during the Civil War years in America.

In 1974, the Morgan purchased a large collection of materials related to the painter Édouard Manet from the American scholar Mina Kirstein Curtiss. Curtiss had acquired them in Paris in the 1950s from Lucienne Tabarant, the daughter of the art historian and journalist Adolphe Tabarant, who published an early catalogue raisonné of Manet’s work, Manet: Histoire catalographique (1931), as well as other important texts on Manet and on the Impressionists.