Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling

Combining diverse artworks from across the Morgan’s collections and some exceptional loans, Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling explores how stories shape our world. The exhibition showcases over 130 objects, including drawings, paintings, photographs, printed books, manuscripts, artifacts, comics, and more, fostering fresh encounters with beloved works of art and literature and presenting exciting new acquisitions. Throughout, Come Together unites modern and historical artworks, underscoring conceptual, thematic, and visual links between them and stimulating new interpretations and imaginative associations.

Come Together traces a trajectory from the universal to the specific, offering new perspectives on the cultural transmission of stories and their overall importance. The first section, “Belief and Belonging,” considers origin stories, epics, legends, and myths, while the second, “Shaping Stories,” sheds light on the creative process through the presentation of drafts, typescripts, and sketches, including a heavily annotated page of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Jean de Brunhoff’s earliest drawings of the perpetually popular pachyderm Babar. The heart of the exhibition, “Picture This!” demonstrates diverse approaches to visual storytelling through a wide array of objects, from Indian miniatures and shadow puppets to early films and the speech bubble.

Boundaries between imaginative and literal worlds are blurred in “Life Stories,” featuring texts and artworks that speak to personal experience, including Henry David Thoreau’s journals and artworks by Philip Guston, Nellie Mae Rowe, Nancy Spero, and Kara Walker. Saul Steinberg’s witty drawing, The West Side (1973), depicting the rest of the United States and the world as an adjunct to New York City, sets the tone for the final section, “New York Stories.” Here, artworks by Joe Baker, Stuart Davis, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and others reflect responses to the multicultural metropolis by visitors, immigrants, and native New Yorkers alike.