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The Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has long been the city’s most photographed museum entrance—tourists taking selfies, fashionistas strutting up the staircase, brides in ballgowns on photo shoots. But this month, the stone colonnade has a new cast of characters: a hawk, a squirrel, a coyote and a deer, each rendered in 10-foot bronze and poised in the niches above the steps like they’ve been waiting all along to join the party.
The installation, The Animal That Therefore I Am, comes from Jeffrey Gibson, the acclaimed artist who represented the U.S. at last year’s Venice Biennale. It’s part of The Met’s Genesis Facade Commission and marks Gibson’s first foray into monumental bronze sculpture. His choice of animals isn’t random; they’re all species native to New York, creatures that city-dwellers encounter in parks, backyards and occasionally sprinting down Broadway. By elevating them to mythic scale, Gibson spotlights the uneasy coexistence between the metropolis and the wild.
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Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is known for fusing Indigenous visual languages with contemporary abstraction. Here, he’s layered the animal forms with abstract patterning that recalls beadwork and textiles. The surfaces bristle with color and texture, pulling traditional motifs into dialogue with the museum’s neoclassical facade. It’s a deliberate collision of histories, materials and perspectives.
“Jeffrey Gibson is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation and a pioneering figure within the field of native and Indigenous art,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s director and CEO. “These new works are based on his signature use of unconventional materials and reimagined forms, employing them to explore often-overlooked histories and the natural world.”
David Breslin, curator in charge of modern and contemporary art, put it more poetically: “Jeffrey Gibson is an artist brilliantly attuned to the varieties of life that our world holds—the human, the animal, the land itself. His art vibrates and bristles with that life.”
The commission is also a reminder that New York isn’t just glass towers and subway grates—it’s hawks circling Tompkins Square Park, deer edging into Westchester lawns, coyotes prowling Central Park and squirrels just about everywhere. By installing them in bronze, Gibson makes them monumental, but also familiar. The Met steps now double as a reminder that the city’s natural habitat doesn’t stop at the park’s stone walls.
The sculptures will remain on view through June 9, 2026.