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One Third the Earth
John Haberin New York City
The Rockefeller Wing of the Met
Oceania, the Ancient Americas, and Africa
New York's largest museum just got bigger, a lot bigger. The Michael C. Rockefeller wing has returned after a long and splendid renovation. Newly designed, it brings to New York the very origins of civilization and the very idea of art.
It displays more than seventeen hundred objects from three continents and six thousand years—and that only a fraction of its founding contribution from Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former governor of New York and vice president of the United States. (It initially refused his gift.) With art of Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas, 
it now represents over a third more of planet earth. Maybe you never knew it existed, even before it closed in 2001. Even if you were old enough, fewer approach the wing for modern and contemporary art from Greco-Roman antiquities on the first floor, rather than Impressionism in France a floor above. Now, though, the invitation is hard to refuse.
Not the dark continent
Is Africa the dark continent? Here all three continents are swimming in light. After the ordinary grid of modest rooms with perhaps an atrium for other wings, like a sales destination or a maze, this wing has tall ceilings that ease the flow from one room and one continent to the next. Broad entrances from room to room, some with arched tops, ease the transitions. The entire south wall is tilted glass, creating vistas and pulling in the light. Glass partitions with short white stripes help to define divisions while visually eradicating them.
Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture, working with Beyer Blinder Belle and the Met's design department, enable all sorts of transitions. You may run up against the glass, but you can always start afresh. To mix things up further, the arts of Oceania resume to the south after a break for the Americas. And that raises another tough question: what are these continents doing together? Is this simply the Third World, stuck in a Cold War past? Is it more than a wealthy donor's tribute to his son Michael, likely lost at sea or killed on an expedition to New Guinea?
Then, too, is the matter of time. A wall of contemporary African photos by Samuel Fosse faces the modern wing directly. Fosse packs his portraits with no end of dignity, whether in dress uniform or bearing the numbers of a criminal. The curators integrate other recent work throughout—including El Anatsui, known for his "metal tapestries" of colorful liquor bottlecaps and sheer scrap. They dip back to the nineteenth century now and then as well. If you had any doubt of the ancient world's influence on the present, you can check them at the door.
The architects set a small gallery aside for temporary exhibitions as well. "Between Latitude and Longitude" brings Iba N Diaye of Senegal together with the European painting that influenced him. He admired equally the fraught expressionism of Francis Bacon or Francisco de Goya and the classicism and introspection of Rembrandt. In his own paintings, fields of color pour into one another—applying Abstract Expressionism to African sandstorms and African politics. But would he have agreed with the Met's selection? He died in 2008.
Back in 1996 the Guggenheim Museum presented "The Art of Africa" as the dark underside of Europe, a place of primitive discord. The Met puts that to shame. A video shows an ancient wall painting—in southern Africa and not in the caves of Spain. Actual objects pick up the story on the Nile, just as a show at the Met of African American artists placed them in context of Egypt and Sudan. If you are left with questions, be grateful for them. I know something about art, but nothing like this.
All I can do is to share the bare facts and my own very personal impressions. You are left to the curators and on your own. The Met, though, has some hints to get you started. If, like me, you are nothing short of overwhelmed, the cultures here took that as a necessary function of art. And they felt an imperative to provide continuity over the centuries—to bring ancestors and dependents fully into the present. The very first human, they say, was an accomplished carver, and I believe them.
The beginning of life
"The paddle is the beginning of life." When you live in a land of a thousand islands, it can only be so. The paddle brings life, as a tool of survival in desperate ocean kingdoms, and connectedness. It makes culture itself possible, as a life among others. So the inhabitants of Oceania understood starting thousands of years ago. It also brings out common cultures that give a precarious unity to the Rockefeller wing of the Met.
Nothing can truly unify the renovated wing's vast territory—nothing like calligraphic art in Asia, patterning in the Islamic wing, or a coherent history of republicanism, racism, and struggle for the American wing with its imagery of slavery, transatlantic revolution, and indigenous people. It can, though, claim a distinct, shared conception of people and art. Expect neither art for art's sake, as a regal, formal, decorative affair, nor storytelling, with images of exalted rulers and myth. Expect instead testimony to craft and the native materials to support it. Expect, too, no distinction at all between a paddle or anything else as a literal means of passage and a metaphor.
Even more, expect human purpose and connection through family. Local peoples claim ancestors as a source of authority, descendants as an enduring legacy. The artists set as their goal to overwhelm their allies and their enemies. They ask to waken spirits. It is a story always in the making, of power and justice. It may take protection from ceremonial shields, but not at the expense of magic.
The wing's dozens of nations are distinct all the same. I came to it from where longstanding habit would suggest, the main hall and Western art. That brought me to memories of Oceania, and it is exhilarating. There one first encounters standing figures—tall, wiry, authoritative, and fun. The curators describe them as between earth and sky, art and life. They represent Asmat, the people, us.
They stand near canoes of impressive length, populated by small paired figures clinging to one another in combat or in play. Naturally they are carved wood, but other media of Oceanic art include whale teeth, fiber, painted bark, and horn. As raw materials go, these are raw indeed. Ceremonial shells are more precious and hardly altered, and musical instruments attest to rituals unseen. Note, though, that the canoes have room for only ancestors and demons. You can only imagine the canoes that others rode.
Most lived among the many islands or in Papua, New Guinea, but not all. For a contemporary viewer, they cannot help raising the question of just who are the people, the us. The carved figures look delightful enough, but could they be the real threat? The Met identifies monstrous hudoq, creatures with sharp teeth to defeat malevolent spirits. Can you find your way in the Rockefeller wing between enemies in life and war? All you can know for certain is the search for reciprocity and balance.
A step around the world
No matter how well you prepare yourself for the reach of the Met's renovated Rockefeller wing, a single step can come as a shock—and that is just what you face in taking an actual step halfway around the world, from Oceania to the Americas. It means leaving islands separated by wide oceans for a newfound density of human habitation. Make that a density of imagery as well in patterns and faces. They appear in tapestries with warm red tones suiting settled interiors. They appear in ceramics as burst of natural and supernatural life. Here, myth has it, the dead are destined to become ancestors.
Not that it is easy to tell the real from the unreal, but the accumulated grimaces feel like a discovery of the human. If they turn out to be far more than human, it is the divine in everyday regalia and the human in the midst of divine combat. Cats are symbols of dominance. Even in its patterning, art is taking risks. A cotton fabric embellished with features is fully abstract, with a simplicity not seen in Western art for centuries to come. It takes the form of alternating rectangles in yellow and deep, soft blue.
Art has a greater diversity within the Americas as well. Its sections mover from the agricultural planning of Colombia and Peru to Mexico City with the Avenue of the Dead. White clay permits burial jars as well. The time dimension becomes more important, too. There begins a post-classical civilization with the Incan empire—and from its loss in the face of Europeans. In due time, murals extend to city walls.
After all that, to turn at last to male and female figures of Africa is to discover a familiarity and a relief. So many Mexican images within images? So much national and cultural combat? The art of Africa, it turns out, represents an unmatched sophistication and stability. Art serves to preserve not sacrifice and war but trade across peoples and biospheres. Maybe it took the new wing's gathering of light, but the continent is nothing like the darkness you may have thought you knew. It is a point of origin for good reason.
Here, too, art has a sense of craft and materials, here in the hands of blacksmiths. It has a favored medium, too, masks—not just face masks but helmet masks, body masks, and headdresses. It would take a diligent viewer indeed to track their style and purpose across thousands of years and emerging nations. Are they, too, ancestral beings? Are they on the side of the angels? Once again you may find yourself with questions.
Africa raises more than any. Its galleries have the greatest integration of recent art as well. They had me thinking back to everything, that I had seen, including that feathery Peruvian blue. Strips of blue fabric from Mali hang gathered and loose. I cannot swear even now that I am at home in the reopened wing. I shall be trying to find my way for years to come around a third of the earth.
The Michael C. Rockefeller wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened to the public June 1, 2025. Iba N Diaye ran through May 31, 2026. Related reviews look at "The Art of Africa," "Africa and Byzantium," and "Primitive Discord."