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Art & Design|The Most Wondrous Art in the World in 1,726 Objects
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/arts/design/michael-rockefeller-metropolitan-africa-oceania-americas.html
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If you want to feel the charge of excitement that great art — no imaginative limits — and new thinking about it can bring, head to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s redesigned and reconceived Michael C. Rockefeller wing, and its collection of work from Africa, the Americas and Oceania that opens on Saturday. Go for the pure visual pleasure of the work there — believe me, it’ll have your eyes spinning — and go for the still unfolding histories it tells.
Every step of the way through the revamped galleries, closed since 2021, is wondrous. Spaces that once felt cramped and crowded have become enveloping vistas that will stop you in your tracks. Objects once confined to boxy wall cases are now free-standing and approachable, to be engaged with, like the living things they were conceived to be, and truly are.
These 1,726 objects — majestic carved wood figures from Africa; pocket-size mythical beings, cast in gold, from Mexico; a communally painted, Sistine-worthy ceiling of the South Seas from New Guinea — are as beautiful as any art anywhere on this earth, and represent the spiritual, political and emotional lives of people spread over five continents and eight millenniums.
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And for even deeper appreciation, it’s useful to remember the history of such work as it has existed in our art museums. Until fairly recently, this art wasn’t here. When, early in the 20th century, the Met was given a substantial collection of pre-Columbian art, it trucked the material across Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History, where, the idea was, it belonged among mineral specimens and dinosaur bones. “Primitive” art was an art of no dates, produced by craftsmen (always men) with no names, in cultures out of touch with any larger world.
Such thinking was still the rule at most art institutions in the 1950s, when Nelson A. Rockefeller, the politician, avid art collector and Met trustee, tried to interest the museum in exhibiting his large collection of pre-Columbian and African material.
