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Merit at the Met

A wave of high-profile, years-in-the-making exhibitions offers a national counterpoint to MAGA efforts to delegitimize inclusion. As the Met’s Lorna Simpson exhibition proves, showing underrepresented artists has always been less about an artist’s identity and more about an artist’s work.

Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson’s paintings are very big and can be overpowering: What makes them interesting isn’t always obvious, and in some cases requires some time and reading to detect. Photo: Angela Pham/BFA.com
Marion Maneker
May 23, 2025

We’re coming to the end of an awkward museum season in which two large, immovable cultural fronts have converged to create some strange and unexpected localized effects. On the one hand, we have the ferocious populism of the MAGA movement, back in power and hell-bent on erasing what it sees as the special pleading of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. On the other, we have the slow-moving, well-meaning machinery of museum programming that has all at once brought the work of half a dozen prominent Black artists to major museum shows in New York and Washington.