"Provides the cultural, archaeological, and historical contexts for a selection of thirty works of art in the Metropolitan Museum's collection"--Slipcase.

This Bulletin accompanies Rayyane Tabet's site-specific installation, which responds to four carved stone reliefs from the ancient site of Tell Halaf, in modern Syria. Now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ancient carvings traveled here under the aegis of the World War I–era Alien Property Act. Approaching this complex history from three perspectives, the text includes a historical discussion of the reliefs—from ancient times to their journey to The Met—by Kim Benzel, Curator in Charge of The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art; a personal account by Rayyane Tabet that chronicles the experiences of his great-grandfather, who worked for Max von Oppenheim, the original excavator of Tell Halaf; and an essay that explores Tabet's installation in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic practice by Clare Davies, Assistant Curator in The Met's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Tabet's work and the three narratives presented in the Bulletin highlight the entangled, complex histories of cultural artifacts in museum collections while emphasizing their power to educate audiences about the ancient world. The Met's connection to Tell Halaf and its artifacts surfaces important contemporary conversations about the evolving role of encyclopedic museums. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

The second volume in a special two-part edition of Recent Acquisitions, this Bulletin celebrates works acquired by the Museum in 2019 and 2020, many of which were gifts bestowed in honor of the Museum’s 150th anniversary year. Highlights of this volume include Jean-Baptise Carpeaux’s astonishing portrayal of an African woman in the marble sculpture Why Born Enslaved!, a monumental storage jar by African American potter and poet David Drake, an exquisite lacquer mirror case depicting an 1838 meeting between the crown prince of Iran and the tsar of Russia, and Carmen Herrera’s abstract work dating to 1949, Iberic. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met's collection.

Based on a thorough examination of the materials and methods used to manufacture these ornaments, I will argue that the jewelry was not simply a rich but passive collection of prestige goods, rather that jewelry that can be read in terms of active ritual, and perhaps cultic, production and display. The particular materials and techniques chosen for the making of Pu-abi's jewelry entailed methodological operations akin to what Alfred Gell has called the "technology of enchantment and enchantment of technology" and allowed these ornaments to materialize from their creation as a group of magically and ritually charged objects.