Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has been closed and under renovation since 2021, reopened May 2025. The Sept 2024 NYT “sneak peak” reported it was to be “ brighter, more open exhibition spaces for the museum’s storied collection of objects from Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania — including stone sculptures, detailed metalwork and colorful ceramic vessels.”
I had planned to combine my trip to Lorna Simpson’s exhibit with an hour or two of an escape thru most of the work in the new wing; wood masks, sculptures and sacred artifacts, along with textile and ceramic pieces were beautifully exhibited from across sub-Saharan Africa. The NYT was right, it was bright, open and an absolutely riveting collection. Click here for the video clip of the “art escape” visit.
I loved every treasure featured and especially the textile pieces, whether kente, mud cloth and especially El Anatsui’s metal “drape fabric.”
El Anatsui
The recent series of works that “Between Earth and Heaven” relates to refer to the celebrated West African traditions of strip-woven textiles namely that of Kente developed by Akan and Ewe weavers in Anatsui’s native Ghana. Those traditional textiles are at once monumental in scale and highly sculptural in the way they drape the body as the apparel of leaders. The undulation of this work evokes that tactile quality and its resplendent color scheme of gold, red, and black translate and transpose the aesthetic of finely woven silk into the medium of base metal.
Arts of Oceania
Kwoma Ceiling evokes the interior of a men’s ceremonial house in Papua New Guinea. It has more than 100 individually painted panels, in the new galleries for the Arts of Oceania in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.
