The Metropol Drama
February 23–July 9, 2023
The Metropol Drama is a case study in how the things we call art speak to and embody values. It presents a terrain comprised of traditionally-defined works of art and artifacts, as well as objects such as legal documents and currencies—forms of negotiation between peoples. The diversity of objects within the exhibition space shows ways in which we form the subjectivities of selfhood across cultures since the time of the ancients up until the present moment within ourselves.
Comprised from
- An Aztec Ceramicist
- A Babylonian Metalsmith
- A Bohemian Glassmaker
- Jacques Callot
- The City of Berlin
- Chen Xiaoyun
- Robert Crumb
- Regina José Galindo
- A Mesopotamian Scribe
- John Miller
- A Photographer Working for The Associated Press
- Pablo Picasso
- Aleksandr Rodchenko
- August Sander
- A Safavid Painter
- Charles Joseph Traviès De Villers
- An Unknown Photographer in Chicago
The Metropol Drama proposes another way of looking at our aesthetic, economic, and emotional history—one that is rooted in the contradictions of interaction that produce peoples and states that are smudged and complex, hybrid and tragic. Having gone by many names, today we call this social and economic amalgam “cosmopolitanism.” The term can best be thought of as a kind of shorthand for a sensibility where the exchange of capital, ideas, and people have provided fertile ground and vulnerabilities for ways of feeling and living.
