PRIDE AND PROVENANCE

The Met's new Rockefeller Wing daxxles—and whispers, “Finders, keepers.”

- BY JULIAN LUCAS

The recent reopening of the Met-ropolitan Museum's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—a spectacular treasury of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—was fortuitously timed. The renovation, which cost seventy million dollars, began in 2021, as a global campaign to decolonize Western museums was prompting some institutions to repatriate looted objects, and others to engage in tortured self-critique. Four years later, an America-first cultural crackdown has freed the Met to cast off the hair shirt of reckoning and celebrate its diverse holdings in a spirit of defiance. Tahitian dancers and Senegalese drummers performed at a festival to mark the reopening, spilling out onto the plaza on Fifth Avenue.

“Light” is the watchword of the renovation, directed by the architect Kulapat Yantrasast, who has transformed a dim, low-ceilinged annex into a cathedrallike hub. Graceful Bamana headdresses and Senufo carved birds have swapped their cramped niches for open platforms and vitrines, arranged in an enfilade of galleries under a ribbed vault inspired by Mali’s Great Mosque of Djenné. Mayan stelae and Melanesian slit gongs share the sunlight from a sloped glass wall abutting Central Park which has been specially reéngineered to protect photosensitive works. Nearly two thousand objects are on display, from the towering bis, or ancestor poles, of the Asmat—collected by Michael C. Rockefeller on an anthropological expedition to Dutch New Guinea, where he disappeared in 1961—to a gilt “linguist’s staff” of the Asante, its finial shaped like a spiderweb. The wing's design stresses each region's singularity while fostering an atmosphere of cosmopolitan exchange. We're meant to feel that the Met is no longer what the writer Ishmael Reed described a half century ago: “the Center for Art Detention.”