The Met’s Renovated Rockefeller Wing Is a Masterpiece

Last month, I encountered a piece of institutional history—a disused piece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exterior—within the galleries of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. This dirtied window once appeared in the Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, where it was meant to guard hallowed Oceanic artifacts from the sunlight that spilled in. Artist Gala Porras-Kim has put it on view in her current solo exhibition, appropriating the slanted glass pane as an artwork.

Within the Met’s galleries, this human-size window previously aided in creating a sense of majesty. But at the Carnegie, it looks more like the wreckage of a decaying building. Porras-Kim, a conceptual artist known for questioning what museums really communicate when they collect and display art, is showing that the Met’s famed home for art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas is akin to a rusting prison to the objects held within, flaunting these artifacts for visitors from far and wide while also ensuring that the objects are siloed from the cultures where they originated.

The reason Porras-Kim was able to obtain this window at all was because the Rockefeller Wing has been shuttered since 2021. This week, following a $70 million renovation, the wing will reopen to the public in a totally new form, with the galleries significantly rearranged. With the exception of one big Oceanic art gallery, this wing was dark and cramped, and in that way quite unlike the rest of the Met, from which these galleries felt isolated. Now, the wing feels airy, gorgeous, and energizing. It’s a masterpiece, and not only due to Kulapat Yantrasast’s redesign, which enlivens a set of galleries that had begun to blunt the power of the art on view.

Accompanying the redesign is a rehang—which may not be entirely unexpected, given how often museums are switching out their collection displays these days to account for prior gaps. But many of those rehangs have focused on modern and contemporary art, and this one, with its attentiveness to new research surrounding non-Western art from centuries ago, feels like something new. It may well act as a model for other institutions to follow.

The most readily apparent shifts here occur in the stunning Oceania galleries, which have been a main attraction at the Met ever since they first opened in 1982, some 13 years after they were donated by Nelson Rockefeller in honor of his son, who acquired the majority of these objects prior to his disappearance in New Guinea in 1961. The galleries’ central ceremonial house ceiling, commissioned by Kwoma artists in Mariwai, Papua New Guinea, and produced between 1970 and 1973, returns; the many paintings on its sago palm sheets look just as exquisite as they had for decades. But the ceiling has been altered: descendants of the painters worked closely with the Met to reconfigure the sheets, so that the ceiling’s composition now better reflects the intentions of its original makers.

A group of wood Asmat funerary poles were once sited beneath the ceiling, towering above the heads of viewers. Now, they have now been moved to a separate gallery focused specifically on Asmat culture, and in their place are several astonishing nioge (bark cloth) paintings produced by members of the Ömie people in Papua New Guinea. One is by Ilma Savari (Ajikum’e), whose work here features dot-like patterning that historically has been passed down for generations in the form of tattoos on men’s bodies. Her work has been newly acquired by the Met, and it is exhibitable here because Yantrasast has covered part of the nearby windows, protecting it from the sunlight that once endangered the art on view here.

There are less immediately visible changes throughout the wing. The wall texts have been reworked, and now perform the double duty of better explicating most objects’ individual cultural contexts while also more transparently laying out the provenance of what’s on view. The latter gesture is a clear response to the calls for museums across the West to repatriate looted objects—and a result of the Met’s recent efforts to build out its provenance research department. (The Met, for its part, sent objects violently plundered from the Kingdom of Benin by British troops back to Nigeria several years ago. That return is now explicitly mentioned in wall text in this wing, but the museum is still exhibiting other works from Benin, which raises thorny questions about whether there isn’t still a lot more justice to be done.)

“Our research is ongoing,” one wall panel notes, “and existing gaps are filled in as new details come to light.” The curators, working under the leadership of Alisa LaGamma, seem more determined than ever to treat the art on view with greater respect, naming creators who previously went unmentioned in wall texts and exhibiting videos of rituals formerly only described in catalogs.

Yantrasast’s redesign emphasizes openness, making it so that you can peer through glass walls in the Oceania galleries and look directly into the spaces for African art. Implicitly, the architecture suggests that none of these cultures existed in total isolation, a rejoinder to the way art history has commonly been taught and studied in the West. The effect is most obvious in the African art galleries, a parade of thrilling mini-presentations centered around specific cultures. With sculptures unevenly arrayed amid a maze of walls and vitrines, these galleries are prismatic and pleasantly dizzying. You can view peoples separated by centuries and geography refracted through one another, warping the conventional flow of time and space.

It’s still possible to find beloved objects here—most notably a 16th-century ivory sculpture depicting Idià, mother of the King of Benin, that has been one of the Met’s crown jewels ever since the ’70s—but they get lost amid a sea of objects that haven’t been given as much due. That’s a good thing: one barometer for the success of a rehang is how many surprises emerge, and there are plenty of them here.

In that vein, the star of this wing—for me, at least—is the gallery devoted to work by Yoruba bead artists based in what is now known as Nigeria. Included here is a puppet depicting a deity known as Òsanyìn, his body made fat by a thick suit formed from zigzags of pink and green beads. There’s also a wonderful crown, its surface adorned with bug-eyed faces whose pupils pop out toward the viewer. If these pieces had been on view before, I don’t recall them. Now, I think I’ll never forget them.

Likewise impressionable is all the fiber art on view. In a gallery devoted to art from modern-day Ghana, there’s a ca. 1910–40 kente cloth by an Asante-Akan artist who has alternated bands of maroon with tremoring yellow and green patterns. This marvelous cloth wasn’t necessarily meant for a museum like the Met—it would’ve been donned by a man and trotted out into the world. But it looks at home here, especially when seen in the context of another cotton-heavy stunner in the nearby Sierra Leone galleries, which feature a 13-foot-long kpoikpoi textile that may have been used as a burial wrap or a wall hanging. Both works act as reminders that crafts such as these have long been a fixture of everyday life in many cultures.

Fiber fever continues in the Americas galleries, which unfortunately get a bit less space than the galleries for African and Oceanic art. Here, the Met is showing off light-sensitive weavings that are only exhibitable because of Yantrasast’s renovation. There’s a remarkable Wari tunic from Peru that abstracts teeth, eyes, and arms into a tumble of pinkish blobs. It shines just as brightly as the golden sculptures from Caribbean peoples viewable nearby.

Adjacent to the Americas galleries is a section for small temporary exhibitions, with the first devoted to Iba Ndiaye, a Senegalese-born modernist who spent time in France. The exhibition outlines the ways that Ndiaye drew on the Western canon and then harnessed its stylings to his own advantage. It places his self-portrait, a cluster of nervous chalk scrawls that cohere to form a face, beside another by Edgar Degas that the curators say inspired Ndiaye’s. Juxtapositions such as that one exemplify this wing’s desire to bridge timelines and cultures.

The curators stumble while trying to establish a linkage between the Met’s antiquities wings and these galleries. The art of ancient Egypt is still separated out in a wing of its own halfway across the museum and never mentioned once here, as though Egyptian art isn’t African art. Meanwhile, one of the oldest objects in this rehang is a Nubian stele from the 2nd century BCE that is awkwardly sectioned out in a gallery of its own. Rather confusingly, the stele doesn’t even belong to the Met, which borrowed it from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, so it’s unclear what will happen to this gallery after the latter museum reclaims the piece.

The wing is more successful at relating its holdings to the 20th century art galleries, which are just steps away (and which are up next for a total overhaul). It makes sense, then, why modern and contemporary art appears frequently in the rehang. A 1980s abstraction on vellum by the Ethiopian-born modernist Skunder Boghossian looks gorgeous beside a 19th-century scroll bearing messages of healing for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, and a 2006 El Anatsui aluminum tapestry is particularly striking in the context of the Asante-Akan kente cloth.

The inclusion of these works reminds viewers that influential African artists such as Boghossian and Anatsui are part of the same art-historical continuum as everything else on view on this wing, much of which was made in the 19th and 20th centuries. No longer does the Rockefeller Wing seem so separate from the rest of the Met. No longer does it feel like the timeworn prison alluded to by Porras-Kim’s piece at the Carnegie Museum. This wing has fully come alive.

Some of the contemporary artists commissioned to create art for this wing clearly want it to remain that way. Taloi Havini, a member of the Hakö people, has created a jaw-dropper of a copper piece that she has patinated with cobalt blue, then etched with arrows, concentric squares, and squiggles that mimic Hakö patterns. Havini has hung her 2025 piece, Nakas: Marks of Matriliny, on a wall facing the windows that once let in UV rays harmful to the art on view. At the Met, Havini’s art acts as shield, ensuring that the works behind it survive as they ought to.