MAY 1, 2024 GRACE EBERT

“Abetare” (2024). All photos by Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Petrit Halilaj magnifies childhood doodles taken from desks in the Balkans in large sculptures that occupy The Met rooftop.

When visiting his hometown of Runik, Kosovo, back in 2010, Petrit Halilaj realized that his elementary school was being demolished. He went to the site—which had miraculously survived the Yugoslav wars that spurred his family to flee to an Albanian refugee camp in 1998—and found a pile of desks, many with doodles and notes scratched into their surfaces.

These etchings have now found their way to New York, where they’re perched atop The Met’s rooftop garden for Abetare, which translates to primer, as in the early education books used for learning basic literacy. Enlarged to proportions that would crush any singular tabletop, the rough drawings are presented as scratchy bronze sculptures depicting a flower, house, and spider á la Louise Bourgeois […]

More: Petrit Halilaj’s Scratchy Doodles Grapple with Childhood Innocence on The Met Rooftop — Colossal