New York’s most famous art museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is currently featuring a groundbreaking exhibition called “Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast.” The exhibition is centered around a single sculpture – a marble bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux entitled Why Born Enslaved! (1868). The bust, featuring a Black woman with tied arms and a defiant expression, became very popular in Europe when it was created. The Met’s exhibition explores the idea that antislavery imagery often reinforced the colonial power structures that they were meant to critique. It is “the first exhibition at the Met to examine Western sculpture in relation to the histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and empire.” The exhibition is thoughtfully and expertly curated to challenge “institutional narratives… bringing race to the forefront of discussions about art and culture.”