Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present 'Poetry and Place: An Evening with Narratio Fellows and Bahar Badiei' on July 31, bringing together poetry, music, and the Met’s Ancient West Asian collection in Gallery 681 at The Met Fifth Avenue. The one-hour performance is scheduled for 6 to 7 pm and is free with Museum admission, with space limited and first come, first served. Registration is recommended.
According to the Museum’s event listing, the program features the 2026 Narratio Fellowship cohort and oud player Bahar Badiei. The fellows created original poems inspired by objects in the Met’s Ancient West Asian collection, with their work exploring memory, migration, identity, and belonging. The evening is described as pairing spoken word with the musical traditions of the oud, inviting audiences into stories that connect cultures, generations, and places across the globe.
The event sits within the Met’s wider summer programming, which includes talks, classes, films, workshops, and performances across its New York sites. In the same season, the Museum has also highlighted the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art’s 'Short Films for Short Nights' series and a range of other public programs. For 'Poetry and Place,' the focus remains squarely on the performance itself and on the relationship between the Museum’s collection and the young artists responding to it.
Narratio is identified by the Museum as a year-long arts and storytelling program for refugee and immigrant youth based in Syracuse, New York. The Fellowship supports young people in developing original creative work across poetry, film, photography, music, and visual art. The Museum says that through mentorship, artistic collaboration, and public performance, Narratio aims to cultivate cultural leaders while amplifying stories that expand public understandings of migration, identity, and belonging.
The event’s pairing of poetry with oud music places the performance in direct conversation with the objects that inspired it. The Met’s Ancient West Asian collection provides the source material for the fellows’ poems, but the listing does not specify individual works. Instead, it frames the evening as an encounter between contemporary youth voices and historical objects, with music helping to shape the rhythm and atmosphere of the performances.
The Museum lists the event as free with admission, and notes that admission is pay what you wish for New York State residents, while children 12 and under with an adult and a care partner accompanying a visitor with a disability are admitted free. The Met also notes that the venue is Gallery 681 at The Met Fifth Avenue, and that the program takes place on Friday, July 31, from 6 to 7 pm.
