Met revamps African art collection
By 2025, visitors to the Michael C Rockefeller wing will experience the art of these regions of the world in a completely new way, writes Andrea Nagel
The most visited museum in the US and the second most visited in the world has closed its galleries for sub-Saharan African Art. Temporarily.
Colloquially referred to as the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of Manhattan’s most iconic landmarks, is in the process of a major renovation, rethinking its displays of African art, ancient American art and Oceanic art to the tune of $70m (about R1.3bn)
This means that these galleries will be closed to the public until northern hemisphere spring next year. As part of the Met’s engagement with the arts of Africa, the museum’s director and CEO Max Hollein and the curator of African art, Alisa LaGamma, travelled to South Africa a few weeks ago, making whirlwind stops in Cape Town and Johannesburg before going to Zimbabwe and Tanzania. They visited art museums, galleries, artist studios and major cultural landmarks, including Great Zimbabwe and Kilwa Kisiwani, a historically significant island in the Lindi region of southern Tanzania.
By 2025, visitors to the Michael C Rockefeller wing, which houses these galleries, will experience the art of these regions of the world in a completely new way, including amazing displays and new scholarship. According to the Met, “the wing, which opened in 1982, was a radical expansion of the cultural achievements recognised by the museum. Since then, we have witnessed a surge in transformative and expanded art historical studies on the vast areas of world art these galleries embrace. Those advances of the last 38 years have sparked a reenvisioning of these global crossroads in the museum.”
I met Hollein in Johannesburg at WAM, the Wits Art Museum, to hear about how the Met is planning to reconfigure the African Art collection, which spans nearly 3,000 works from across Sub-Saharan Africa, covering two millennia.
“The Michael C Rockefeller wing originally opened in 1982,” said Hollein. “This was a great moment as it was one of the first times a large museum would exhibit the sub-Saharan art of Africa as outstanding, pristine work and not in an ethnographic context.”
In 1969 philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller donated his fine-arts survey of non-Western art traditions. The collection, which included his many African pieces, marked the start of the new wing and was named after Rockefeller’s son, anthropologist Michael C Rockefeller. The department has since tripled in size mostly thanks to other gifts.
It features thousands of works from several hundred distinct cultures and 39 countries in Africa. It will be refreshed with film, audio guides and prompts to online content.
Hollein mentions the term Sankofa from the Akan culture, which refers to a quest for knowledge, visualised as a bird with its feet planted forward and head turned back to symbolise the project, as it involves a critical examination of the past as a guide for renewal. The renovation is being overseen by Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architects. Yantrasast will update the galleries in the 3,716m2 wing on the southern side of Fifth Avenue.
Renderings of Yantrasast’s design show a curved, white ribbed ceiling covering gallery spaces and stone-like partitions to showcase artworks. There will be plenty of open space for the display of large statues.
Hollein suggests that part of the impetus for the major renovation is the change in scholarship concerning these areas of world. “There’s an attempt to further advance the understanding, appreciation and contextualisation of these cultures and to highlight parallels and contrasts that consider how societies across continents, and 5,000 years, have addressed issues of authorship, patronage, trade, governance, state ideology and ancestral commemoration,” he said.
“The scholarship has expanded to show that these cultures were not isolated. We know that trade happened in terms of the exchange of forms and objects. Now we are much more interested in the context of an object, the craftsmanship and technique, but we’re also focused on the artistic impetus. Ideally, where we can, we want to identify the individual hand of the artist.”
Though these collections do not feature contemporary African art, Hollein said contemporary art from Africa is part of the Met’s collection of modern and contemporary art, which has expanded significantly in the last couple of years. “We are also renovating our contemporary art wing. It’s a major project which will probably be finished in 2029 and our contemporary African art collection will grow significantly too.”
Hollein stresses that the Met is not a gallery. It’s a museum that includes cultural costumes, fashion and design. “The renovated wing will represent a broad overview of all the different artwork of Africa which has survived,” he says.
“Part of the impetus behind re-envisioning these collections for a new generation of visitors is to do with the location of the Met in New York, which is a diverse city with multiple diasporic communities. Part of the purpose of this trip is to make sure that there’s not only a strong connection between these communities in New York, but between people in Africa, whose culture is being represented in the Met, and the visitors to the museum, both local and international, in New York.
“We do a lot of fellowship programmes in different parts of Africa and we have collaboration agreements with many different institutions. We also invite scholars from various countries to the museum to work with us on the exhibitions and installations.”
He stresses that part of the renovation is a genuine interest in connecting the world through culture. “The collection is not only about paintings, objects and artefacts — it’s about bringing people of the world together to understand the broader context of our collective experiences.”
According to Hollein, over the next 10 years, the Met will invest more than $2bn to refurbish the museum.