The Metropolitan Museum of Art has named Danh Vo as the artist of its 2027 Genesis Facade Commission, the museum announced on 15 October. Vo will create four new sculptures for the historic niches of the museum's Fifth Avenue Beaux-Arts facade, on view from 16 September 2027 through June 2028. In the same round of commissions, the Met also tapped the Norwegian-Congolese artist Sandra Mujinga for a site-specific installation in the Great Hall, due to open next November.

Born in 1975 in Bà Rịa, Vietnam, Vo studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and works between rural Germany, Mexico City and Kyoto. His practice is built around objects that have gathered meaning over time — religious relics, photographs, scraps of leather, fragments of antiquity — and the way they carry unresolved histories. The Met said the commission brings the present into conversation with objects spanning thousands of years and the many people who made and cared for them. Met director Max Hollein praised Vo as an artist deeply attuned to how objects carry meaning across time, while Hyundai Motor art director DooEun Choi said the artist explores how meaning is shaped and transformed as it moves across contexts.

Vo's edition is the fourth in the Genesis-sponsored facade series, which began in 2024 following Lee Bul and Jeffrey Gibson, with Liu Wei's 'Speculation' currently on view. It is the eighth facade commission overall since the annual series launched in 2019 with Wangechi Mutu, cementing the Fifth Avenue niches as one of the most visible public-art platforms in the United States.

Mujinga, whose practice draws on Afrofuturism, science fiction and post-colonialism, will present her installation in the museum's interior Great Hall — a high-profile follow-up to her appearances at major biennials. The pair of announcements underscores the Met's strategy of handing its most prominent public spaces to mid-career artists whose work interrogates how history is told and who gets to tell it.