The Met Goes Oceanic, Mayan, and Edo in the Reborn Rockefeller Wing

The art is fantastic, and it’s a tribute to Michael and Nelson Rockefeller.

I hadn’t visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hard to believe, since this past spring, when I reviewed its splendid Sargent and Paris.

Summer in New York is disgusting, a very good reason to skip it, but so much happens at the Met that an art critic could write about it all the time. It’s a big country, so I spent my pennies going west — Santa Fe; Albuquerque; Milwaukee; under-the-radar Sheboygan, the Malibu of the Midwest; Chicago; and Texas.

Two or three weeks ago, I went, aesthetically at least, far, far west, to West Papua, Borneo, Sumatra, and all the places and cultures covered by the Met’s Michael J. Rockefeller Wing, which the museum calls “reimagined,” but it’s a new museum within the museum. It’s exotic, bewitching, and bewildering. Skip the Impressionists, skip the Temple of Dendur, skip even Washington Crossing the Delaware, and spend serious time in the Met’s new Oceanic and African galleries. It’s a fantastic, indelible experience.

For shock-and-awe value, it’s hard to beat the Ceremonial House Ceiling, from between 1970 and 1973, 270 small, abstract paintings on bark and palm leaves, 80 by 30 feet, and from northeast New Guinea. Over our heads is a world of fruit bats and crocodiles, the moon, birds, and shooting stars. It covered a male initiation space and seems like a little cathedral, which it is. It’s not chromatically expansive — there are lots of variations of brown — but it’s still brilliant and sparkling. In part, it’s bravado. At the Met, it’s the ceiling of a big gallery that also covers art from 10,000 islands from New Guinea and Micronesia, east into Polynesia and south to New Zealand.

It’s immersive and expansive. The Rockefeller Wing opened in 1982 and displays art from sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Americas, which means south-of-the-border antiquities, and the Pacific Islands. So, it’s the art of hundreds of cultures over three continents and thousands of years. At 40,000 square feet at the south end of the Met, the galleries turned drab over the years and, worse, became a transition space between the parking garage and the antiquities galleries or, worse yet, a place to be startled by scary reed masks while lost. Will I ever get out, or will my head be shrunken, too? The galleries, showing about 2,000 objects, needed to be rearranged, relit, and interpreted anew. They’ve been closed since 2021. Thanks to the genius of architect Kulapat Yantrasast and the Met’s curators, and with the help of $70 million, the wing is now a destination. It’s as though the art has been freed, and visitors freed, too, to explore and learn.

I spent most of my time in the Oceanic rooms since the Ceremonial House Ceiling is famous and such a presence but, mostly, because the wing is a memorial to Michael Rockefeller (1938–1961), the son of Nelson (1908–1979), New York’s governor and an icon of the 1960s and ’70s. More on Rockefeller’s shocking death later, but it’s best to start here. Defining the wing’s fascinating otherness are the ceiling and, nearby, ancestor poles made around 1960 in Papua New Guinea. They’re spectacular wood sculptures, most around 20 feet tall and 12 inches in diameter, so they soar.

The group on view, not in cases but there, in the raw, come from ceremonies that honored someone who died. An abstract sculpture of the newly dead man is on top, with a remarkable phallus to sculptures of spirits who are ancestors from the past. The thing starts with a tree that has plank-like buttress roots, turned upside down so the roots are carved to represent the man who just left us, who seems like a fresh, young angel, except for the phallus and a reference to headhunting. You see, in this culture — the Asmat’s, in southwestern New Guinea — a death was always seen as the action of an enemy and needed to be avenged. These aren’t turning-the-other-cheek types.

Women could have babies, but men, the Asmat believed, could experience their generative capacity through headhunting. Here in Vermont, I’m happy with the whole, living bodies of two spacey cats and a rambunctious schnauzer. Still, I love the ancestor poles’ elongated torsos, some with carved-out cores indicating that the spirit has fled.

I like the elegant, stately progression from marquee objects like the ancestor poles to informative texts, canoes, a royal drum, which often was the only musical instrument, and the Asmat body mask, made of mulberry fiber, palm leaves, bamboo, and feathers. The mask is life-size, with wooden eye ornaments washed with red, white, and black dyes. Not that it needs any animation, but new gallery lighting — mostly natural — helps to transform the experience. The old lighting, mostly dark, seemed to pickle the art. Views from the windows to Central Park link art to nature, not that its pin oaks, elms, maples, and black cherry trees are to be found among the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Often the art is unmediated, which means uncased. That’s the best way to experience it.

I read and hear lots about “reckonings,” mostly about race and all a species of diarrhea, intellectual and moral diarrhea, but the new wing is a reckoning that’s real. In 1942, Nelson Rockefeller offered his African and Pre-Columbian art to the Met as a gift. The museum declined, viewing art that wasn’t European, American, and imperial Asian as ethnographic, as artifacts, and best for the Museum of Natural History. In a huff, he established the Museum of Primitive Art on West 54th Street in a townhouse near the Museum of Modern Art.

The gift offer hovered over the Met into the 1970s and ’80s, past Nelson’s death, until the museum took it, but, still, ghosts haunted the space. As with contemporary art, for years the Met seemed not to know what to do with the objects. Nelson initially wanted to call his 54th Street space the Museum of Indigenous Art, but “indigenous” sounded too much like “indigent” and evoked New York’s abundant slums and the future that was West Side Story, riots, and the welfare state. African art seemed mumbo-jumbo; Oceanic art, too far gone on feathers; and Mesoamerican art, squat and heavy on ceramics. Prejudices and ignorance abounded. Academically, into the ’80s, the fields were still developing. Yale, in my era there, had two trailblazer scholars in the ancient art of Latin America — George Kubler and Mary Miller — and Bob Thompson, the Africanist. When Bob died in 2021, his obituary called him a “guerrilla scholar,” and he was. There were always oddball collectors of African art, but Bob invented the field.

Finally, the Met’s Oceanic collection is getting its moment. It’s not that the Met ignored the art in the Rockefeller Wing. But the stars needed to align, among them money, curatorial prowess, public interest, and, since this is New York, real estate.

And not everything is from Nelson. Rockefeller gifts and bequests, and art bought with Rockefeller money, account for about half the objects on view. The Met has gotten lots of art beyond Rockefeller largess. It bought the Ceremonial Art Ceiling, for instance, in 1978 with money from other pots. The critical influx over the 40 years since the wing opened made a new look both necessary and a revelation.

Then there’s Michael Rockefeller. Michael, blessed by Rockefeller genes, money, legend, and smarts, saw himself as an explorer. He wasn’t a dilettante or a pirate, but a serious amateur scholar and young art collector focused on the Asmat people in swampy South Papua, New Guinea. In November 1961, Michael disappeared — for good — after leaving his disabled boat off the coast from the swamps where the Asmat lived. He hoped to swim to shore. Whether he met his maker from drowning, crocodiles, or cannibals was an absorbing — and international — question about the time I started reading newspapers so, naturally, I devoured every twist and turn. Being a Rockefeller, and with his father the governor of New York, Michael became a legend and mystery. The Asmat body mask is among the many things he bought for his and his father’s collection. In spirit and in daring, he’s there, in the new Rockefeller wing. He was no wuss.

Twenty or so years ago, Michael became part of the fake problem of white, rich, entitled, colonialists poking and pillaging the natural perfection that’s best called “Typee Life,” as in Melville’s Typee, about an island utopia, “Why Live Past Thirty,” and “The Cannibal Chef.” I’ll skip that bourguignon — I might have shared a glass of wine with that liver — and pass on child sacrifice, weather gods, and a diet of tubers. The Met, in keeping with the times, seems to be inclined, as I am, less to reckon and repent and return and more to educate and enlighten, using the treasures that have befallen it. It has restituted a few Benin bronzes, part of a craze, but otherwise sits tight on its Oceanic, African, and Ancient Americas art. Helping is a simple fact. Most Oceanic and African objects in museum collections are contemporary, or from the last century. The art is still being made and can be purchased with transparency. Each section in the Rockefeller Wing has a provenance panel noting how the art market is different from, say, Greek and Roman antiquities, a very dirty field.

Speaking of dirty fields, I skipped, mostly, the Rockefeller Wing’s African galleries. The collection isn’t great, and the Met has a “race is everything” obsession, so very good art — such as the Throne of Njouteu, the supreme flower of beadwork, from Cameroon — gets lost in rhetoric and contemporary photographs. About 5 feet tall and very rare, it depicts a royal couple above figural leopards, with drinking horns, calabash receptacles, and leopard-skin belts. The collection is a work in progress that needs to be augmented to reach its potential.

The Met has done many wonderful exhibitions on the ancient art of Mexico, Central America, and South America, among them Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art and Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas, so it’s had practice. The galleries are, together, a survey worth doing since most Americans and, likely, nearly all foreign tourists visiting the Met don’t know anything about the art-rich cultures in, for instance, Mexico, destroyed by their own failures, Spanish conquest, or mysteriously. We’re still learning.

It’s worth hunting to find, but the gold-serpent labret is one of my favorite objects in the whole kit and caboodle that’s the Rockefeller Wing. Made sometime between 1325 and 1521, the rise and fall of the Maya empire, it’s a plug to be inserted through a pierced lower lip. At about 3 inches in diameter and weighing a little under 2 ounces, it’s not big in the world of things, but, sported between lip and chin, it surely had presence. It was likely a royal ornament. There’s royal devotion — think Princess Anne — and then there’s this.

In Maya times, gold was thought to be the excrement of the gods. Here, the jaw of the serpent and its serrated teeth, fangs, and tongue together make a statement, but we don’t know what. Was it a tribute to eloquence? Royals were conduits to the gods, so they were charged with truth. Was it meant to sober or to scare the plebian excrement from its beholder? We know it’s rare since it’s royal, but it’s also rare because gold was often melted and refashioned over time.

The renewal of the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries a few years ago made the Rockefeller Wing a more inviting and logical destination. From the Greek and Roman galleries, we enter spaces for African art. That’s a mistake since the African collection isn’t the best, but the Met curators and its leadership want us to believe a fatuous theory that sub-Saharan art rooted Egyptian, Greek, and Near Eastern art. Whatever gets us in the door. The new Tang Wing, set to open in 2030 and highlighting the Met’s contemporary art, will connect to the Rockefeller Wing, so conversations among objects will be infinitely enhanced.

The reborn Rockefeller Wing will transform a visit to the Met. I spent my time there, riveted, and didn’t miss the European galleries one bit. Over time, the wing will refocus the Met, which isn’t a bad idea if it means a richer aesthetic and educational experience.