The art of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and North, Central, and South America are overseen by a single curatorial department at the Metropolitan. More than 11,000 works of art of varied materials and types represent at least four millennia of greatly diverse cultural traditions. The department's holdings range from ritual sculpture and monuments of wood and stone to gold and silver ornaments, masks, costumes, and other textiles. At one end of the department's vast chronological range are archaeological American objects from 2000 B.C.E.; at the other are African and Pacific works from our own time. Strengths of the collection include decorative and ceremonial objects from the Court of Benin in Nigeria; sculpture from West and Central Africa; sculpture in wood from New Guinea and the island groups of Melanesia and Polynesia; and objects of gold, ceramic, and stone from the Precolumbian cultures of Mexico and Central and South America.
Highlights from the department are presented in the Collection Database, organized by country or culture of origin and, within those designations, chronologically.
More about the Department and Its Collection
Although The Metropolitan Museum of Art made its first acquisitions among these fields—a group of Peruvian antiquities—as early as 1882, no significant commitment to the arts of Africa, Oceania, or the Americas was made until 1969. At that time, Nelson A. Rockefeller offered the entire collection of a museum that he had founded in 1954 in association with René d'Harnoncourt, the Museum of Primitive Art, to the Metropolitan Museum. Included in the gift were 3,300 works of art, a specialized library, The Robert Goldwater Library, and The Photograph Study Collection.
Today the collection of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas is housed in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, named for Nelson Rockefeller's son, who collected many of the Asmat objects from Papua Province (western New Guinea), Indonesia, that are now in the Museum. Among the most spectacular objects in the wing are the nine fifteen-foot-high Asmat memorial poles (bis) collected by Michael Rockefeller during an expedition to New Guinea in 1961. The Rockefeller Wing, designed as a mirror image of the Sackler Wing, opened to the public in February 1982 with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space on the south side of the Museum.
The African component of the department's collection covers a large geographical area, from the western Sudan south and east through central and southern Africa. The works of art range from refined Afro-Portuguese ivories of the fifteenth century to formally powerful Fang reliquary figures that appealed to early-twentieth-century artists such as Jacob Epstein and André Derain, and include figurative and architectural sculpture, masks, seats of leadership, staffs of office, ceremonial vessels, and personal ornaments. Many of these objects were created to reinforce the rank and prestige of regional leaders, others to indicate the collective status of initiates invested with specific social responsibilities, still others to pay homage to ancestral forces. While wood is the primary medium, objects made of stone, terracotta, gold, silver, and ivory are also present, as are textiles and beadwork.
Objects that originated in the Pacific Islands (the archipelagos of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia), Australia, and Island Southeast Asia constitute the Oceanic component of the department's collection. Covering more than a third of the earth's surface, Oceania subsumes more than a thousand distinct cultures and an immense diversity of artistic traditions. While the earliest examples of Oceanic art—the rock paintings of the Australian Aboriginals—are thought to be more than 40,000 years old, the majority of surviving works date from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Though the Metropolitan's collection is particularly strong in the sculpture from the island of New Guinea, both from the Sepik River region and from Papua Province in the west, it also introduces visitors to the elegant realism of sculpture from Polynesia and Island Southeast Asia; to the angular, minimalist aesthetic of objects from Micronesia; to surreal, otherworldly images of Melanesian ancestors and spirits; and to the graceful figures and vibrant abstractions of Australian Aboriginal art. A recently added section within the Oceanic galleries is the Metropolitan’s first-ever gallery devoted to the indigenous arts of Island Southeast Asia. This gallery presents sculpture, jewelry, and boldly patterned textiles from the indigenous peoples of Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and adjoining regions.
The department's holdings of Precolumbian art represent a large area of the two great American continents that reaches from Mexico south through Peru. The holdings cover a 3,500-year period that begins at about 2000 B.C.E. and ends with the arrival of the Spanish in the late fifteenth century C.E. Among the Precolumbian objects on view from Mexico are Olmec ceramic vessels and figures from the first millennium B.C.E., appealing sculptural ceramics from West Mexico of the end of that millennium, and Aztec stone sculpture dating to the fifteenth century. Maya works include an elegant, imposing seated figure in wood, a rare survivor of the almost tropical environment, and fluidly carved relief sculptures of the eighth century. From the Caribbean are the works by the Taino peoples with the distinctive imagery that adorns pieces from small items of shell to large sculptures in wood. Objects and textiles of many eras represent ancient South America: ceramic vessels of Chavin times in the first millennium B.C.E.; textiles and garments of several millennia and places, which are of amazing color and ingenious patterning, and there are works of metal—of gold and/or copper—of many different purposes and greatly divergent presentation. The Jan Mitchell Treasury for Precolumbian Works of Art in Gold, which opened in the South American Gallery in 1993, houses the most comprehensive display of ancient American gold objects in the world.
A gift of particular note is that of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, in which well over one hundred works from the Court of Benin in Nigeria were added to the collection. Dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, the Perls' gift consists of brass figures and architectural plaques, carved ivory altar tusks, musical instruments, boxes, staffs, and courtly and personal ornaments, among other objects. This important addition of royal art has been installed, together with the Metropolitan's other holdings from the Court of Benin, in the center of the recently renovated Benenson Gallery for African Art. The Benenson Gallery, which opened to the public in early 1996, displays approximately four hundred works, representing many of the regions of sub-Saharan Africa.
In the fall of 2007, the Museum opened the New Galleries for Oceanic Art and the New Gallery for the Art of Native North America. These stunningly redesigned and reinstalled galleries allow the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas to display a larger portion of the Museum's renowned masterworks, as well as recent acquisitions.
Temporary exhibitions organized by the department are held in the Rockefeller Wing's special exhibition space.
