Met plans growing focus on African art
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art wants to offer its millions of visitors a less Westerncentred view of the world, a shift that will highlight works from Africa and the continent’s 3,000 years of cultural history.
That shift in perspective would also help one of the world’s most-visited museums attract more African-American and diaspora visitors, Met CEO and executive director Max Hollein said.
The museum, on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, hopes to shine a brighter light on its 4,000 African works, produced by more than 200 cultures from what today are nearly 40 sub-Saharan African countries.
After spending tens of millions of dollars on renovations, the Met will reopen its Michael C. Rockefeller wing in spring 2025, which houses not just African art but also works from the South Pacific and the early Americas.
“We wanted to have a new architecture and scenography in showing this [body] of art, and especially African art,” said Hollein, a 54-year-old Austrian art historian and the first European to lead the Met.
He took the Met’s reins in July 2023 as it was recovering from a collapse in visitors during the pandemic. It went on to draw 5.4 million visitors in 2023, a figure 10 per cent higher than in 2019.
Hollein said the Rockefeller wing, which opened in 1982, already represented a major shift to a “much broader perspective” for the museum, founded and financed by wealthy art lovers, businessmen and collectors of works from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as well as from ancient Greece and Rome.
But once the renovated African galleries open in 2025, they would mark “another milestone”. The museum wanted “to make sure that we don’t have just a Westerncentric or Eurocentric perspective”, Hollein said.
The Met has also extended its reach by negotiating agreements with African counterparts, such as a 2023 accord with Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments to help it with the digitisation and cataloguing of its holdings.
The Met organised an ambitious exhibition on the arts of the Sahelian empires of the Middle Ages – Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Segu – in 2020, and a smaller one, which ended in March, on 1,000 years of influence by the Byzantine empire on the art of the Christians of Egypt, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Hollein said it was time to step back from a Eurocentric view – to stop “just looking at these objects because they have influenced European modernism so much” or studying Maori sculptures only because “they fascinated French artists of the early 20th century”.
To deepen his connection to African art and better understand its works in their local context, Hollein travelled to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Tanzania in March, meeting with museum curators, art historians and contemporary artists.
He visited some rare archaeological sites: Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of a medieval city in that country’s south, and the Tanzanian island of Kilwa Kisiwani, where the remains of a medieval city are recognised as a Unesco World Heritage site.
Videos with updated information on the sites would be shown in the Met’s Rockefeller wing.
“It’s the art of Africa, but it is basically also the cultural heritage of African-Americans in the United States,” Hollein said.