Home Renovation

"THE EFFORTS OF Western museums to make a case to their local audiences that other artmaking cultures outside the Global North are not monolithic or homogeneous continue apace. The institution that examines and defines is trying to catch up to what the examined and defined have known all along: that our art traditions are impossible to easily distill, collectively claim, or explain as any one thing. Progress by the paragraph."

"This past May, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened its Michael C. Rockefeller wing, which is now home to an expanded exhibition of the institution's holdings in art and objects from ancient Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. In years past, the Met's presentation of "African art" seemed mostly skin-deep. But thanks to Alisa LaGamma, the Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator for African Art, as well as WHY Architecture; Beyer Blinder Belle Architects LLP; and the Met's own design team, the collection is transformed."

"Previously, only nominal details typically were offered about any given item's cultural significance, social or ceremonial functions, and creator(s). There were also rarely attempts to highlight a work's importance within art history (read: the Western canon) in any meaningful way. With the reinstallation, one can sense a deeper, more thoroughgoing consideration about the objects on view-at least to the extent that the museum was able to find and disseminate new information about them."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened its Michael C. Rockefeller wing with an expanded exhibition of African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art and objects. Curatorial and design teams reframed the collection to provide deeper cultural, ceremonial, and creator-specific information where previously only nominal details were given. The reinstallation emphasizes historical relationships between Northern and Southern arts, suggesting a narrative continuum rather than isolated categories. New gallery configurations and interpretive research aim to transform superficial presentations into contextualized displays that acknowledge complexity, cultural specificity, and the importance of situating non-Western works within broader art-historical conversations.

Read at Artforum