Religion & Spirituality

Join artists as they reflect on works in the exhibition Africa and Byzantium and make connections to their own artistic practices.

Explore Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE in this virtual tour of the exhibition.

This video features Buddhist monks from the New York Buddhist Vihara Foundation chanting a blessing of suttas (sutras), the spoken word of the Buddha as preserved in the Sri Lankan tradition.

In her fifth and final performance as 2021-2022 MetLiveArts Artist in Residence, the incomparable choreographer and dancer Bijayini Satpathy built on her prior explorations of movement and art with an evening-length performance for the stage of the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The new work, entitled “Dohā,” navigates the relationship between prayer and play, moving away from the Odissi dance form’s customary theistic depictions to highlight the bhāva—emotional experience—of prayer as an embodied human act. Within the discipline of ritualized prayer, Satpathy embraces play and playfulness as an essential part of the individual’s search for the divine.

An exploration of the body in prayer, “The Prayer” was created especially for the Chapter House at The Met Cloisters, and is inspired by the site’s meditative architecture. The music evokes a haunting stream of prayers, resonating calls, and chants drawn from Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, and Gregorian traditions.

Go behind the scenes with artist Cecily Brown, who discusses the inspiration and making of Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, the first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home.