An Exclusive Peek at the Met’s Reimagined Rockefeller Wing
The New York Times
With more than 1,800 works from five continents, and new scholarship, refreshed galleries present the arts of Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania as three distinct areas.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has been closed and under renovation since 2021, is not scheduled to open until May 2025. But a recent early peek at the wing’s refurbished galleries already reveals brighter, more open exhibition spaces for the museum’s storied collection of objects from Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania — including stone sculptures, detailed metalwork and colorful ceramic vessels.
Perhaps most strikingly, the $70 million renovation designed by WHY Architecture and Beyer Blinder Belle Architects is now presenting the three areas as distinct in their own right, rather than grouped together under the archaic rubric of “primitive,” as they were in the past.
“Back then, these works were seen as the non-Western, ‘the other,’” Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, said in an interview, adding, “our perspective has evolved.”
The collection, assembled by the philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller, was given to the Met in 1969 as a new department and wing, with more than 3,000 objects. It opened in 1982, with a dramatic floor-to-roof wall of glass. The wing was named for Rockefeller’s son Michael C. Rockefeller, who disappeared at age 23 in 1961 on a collecting expedition among the Asmat, a group from southwestern New Guinea. (The exhibition at the Met will include nine soaring carved Asmat poles.)
The wing’s 16 galleries also aim to reintroduce the collection in the context of the global canon of art history, highlighting with its Africa collection, for example, connections with Greek, Roman and European sculpture and decorative arts.
