Roof Garden Commission – serie

The artist Dan Graham (b. 1942) has a wide-ranging practice that encompasses writing, performance art, installation, video, photography, and architecture. Throughout his career, Graham has examined the symbiosis between architectural environments and their inhabitants, particularly in his pavilions made of glass and mirrors.His new installation, created for the roof garden of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, addresses current issues about suburban psychology and political surveillance. Graham’s work combines landscaping, hedges, and two-way mirrors to create a provocative, immersive experience for viewers. This creatively designed publication includes an insightful interview between the artist and Sheena Wagstaff and focuses not only on Graham’s latest commission but also on his previous landscape-oriented installations, providing a focused, fascinating study of one of today’s leading contemporary artists.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art(04/28/14–11/02/14)

This exploration of Petrit Halilaj’s site-specific installation reflects the artist’s personal experience as a refugee of war and the universal hopes and fears captured in children’s drawings  Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (born 1986, Kostërc, former Yugoslavia) creates complex, immersive installations that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity while expressing his wish to alter the course of personal and collective histories. In his first major outdoor installation, the artist reflects on his experience as a refugee and explores the intersection of reality and fantasy through the rich world of children’s drawings. This volume examines Halilaj’s inspiration for the work in found inscriptions, carvings, and scribbles collected from desks at his former primary school and other schools in Eastern Europe—a record of young people’s fantasies, fears, and private messages conveyed in many languages. An interview with Halilaj connects his practice with those of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Julio González, situates this project within his broader career, and considers how memory, identity, and history present in his work. This publication reveals his new installation to be at once a story of children in a time and place marked by social and political conflict and a universal reflection on youthful imagination, hopes, yearnings, anxieties, and dreams.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(April 30–October 27, 2024)