First look: This historic wing of The Met just got a major update

Time Out

2 days ago

After a four-year renovation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has reopened its galleries dedicated to the arts of Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania. These historic galleries, housed within the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, are packed with 1,800 artworks spanning five continents and hundreds of cultures.
To celebrate the opening, the Upper East Side museum is hosting a daylong festival on Saturday, May 31 with performances, live music, art making and more. It's free with museum admission—which is always pay-what-you-wish for New Yorkers.
Max Hollein, The Met's CEO, described the 40,000-square-foot Rockefeller Wing's reopening as 'much more than a renovation.' Instead, he said at a grand opening event, 'it's a re-envisioning of one of the museum's most important spaces.'
Inside the galleries, you'll find several objects on view for the first time, including new acquisitions of contemporary African works and new commissions by Indigenous artists for the Oceania galleries. Also don't miss a gallery dedicated to light-sensitive ancient Andean textiles, which is the first of its kind in the United States.
It's a re-envisioning of one of the museum's most important spaces.
New features, such as documentary films, audio commentary, artist bios and expanded wall text, help to provide contemporary perspectives and offer deeper engagement with the work.
As for the design, expect brighter galleries with a custom-designed sloped glass wall adjacent to Central Park and a dramatic entryway where curved ceilings arch above carved wooden ancestor poles made by artists in West Papua.
Inside the sprawling wing, you'll find a vast exploration of cultures. For example, you can learn about manifestations of faith in the western Sahel's communities, then discover funerary carvings from New Ireland. See a golden staff from Ghanian royalty dating back to the 1930s, as well as a collection of ornate ear flares dating back to to the 1300–1400s in Peru, to name a few.
To update the galleries, the museum team worked with collaborators across the globe. Signage in the galleries points out the provenance (or chain of custody) of the pieces. All of the works at The Met were acquired from private individuals who obtained the pieces in the region or through the intentional art market. Or the museum purchased the pieces from commercial galleries or public auctions.
The new space was designed by WHY Architecture in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle Architects LLP and with The Met's Design Department. Each gallery's look is meant to pay homage to the architectural vernaculars of each featured region.
The Rockefeller Wing first opened in 1982, beginning as the personal collection of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. It helped to expand the worldviews of the art inside The Met's walls.
'You will see human ingenuity and cultural ingenuity,' Hollein said. 'It's a celebration of the richness of culture, of global artistic expression and how everything is connected.'
Highlights from each gallery
Arts of Africa
Explore The Met's collection of sub-Saharan African art through 500 works highlighting major artistic movements and living traditions from across the subcontinent. The new galleries present original creations spanning from the Middle Ages to the present, including a 12th-century fired clay figure shaped in Mali's Inner Niger Delta and the fiber creation Bleu no. 1 by acclaimed innovator Abdoulaye Konaté. A quarter of the works are on display at The Met for the first time.
Arts of the Ancient Americas
These galleries feature 700 works exploring the artistic legacy of Indigenous artists from across North, Central and South America and the Caribbean prior to 1600. The new galleries include monumental stone sculptures and exquisite metalwork and also include refined ceramic vessels; shimmering regalia of gold, shell, and semiprecious stone; and delicate sculptures of wood. Don't miss the new gallery devoted to ancient American textiles and featherwork, which frames a 3,000-year history of achievements in the fiber arts.
Arts of Oceania
Discover more than 500 years of art from this expansive region, newly framed by Indigenous perspectives. The galleries house 650 works, drawn from over 140 distinct cultures in a region of astonishing diversity. These include monumental artworks from the large island of New Guinea and the coastal archipelagos that stretch beyond its shores to the north, central, and eastern Pacific, as well as the two neighboring regions of Australia and Island Southeast Asia, whose Indigenous communities all share a common ancestry. New acquisitions broaden the collection to include the work of women, especially fiber work by senior female artists from Australia and New Guinea.