The reimagined galleries in The Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing will reframe and reintroduce the collection of works representing almost 6,000 years of history from North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, presenting new research on artists, materials, and meanings
(New York, October 4, 2024)–The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that it will reopen its galleries dedicated to the Arts of the Ancient Americas on May 31, 2025. The galleries have been closed to the public since summer 2021, and the reopening follows the completion of a major renovation and reenvisioning of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, where the galleries are housed.
The reinstallation is organized around nearly 700 works selected to foreground the artistic legacy of Indigenous artists from across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean prior to 1600 CE. This extraordinary collection will be reintroduced for a new generation of visitors while reflecting contemporary scholarship and research and providing a more encompassing view of the ancestral arts of the Americas. The new galleries will include monumental stone sculptures and exquisite metalwork, illuminated by filtered daylight from Central Park through a custom-designed, state-of-the-art sloped glass wall on the south facade. The collection also includes refined ceramic vessels; shimmering regalia of gold, shell, and semiprecious stone; and delicate wood sculptures.
The suite of galleries was designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of the firm WHY Architecture in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle Architects LLP, and with The Met’s Design Department. The new galleries for the Arts of the Ancient Americas are across from the galleries for Modern and Contemporary Art and adjacent to those dedicated to the arts of the Pacific region. Drawing inspiration from ancient American architectural traditions, the design incorporates stone platforms that echo the layout of landmarks from Mesoamerica and the Andean region, from the rectilinear plazas of Central Mexico to the U-shaped, enfolding arms of sacred architecture of Peru’s North Coast. A highlight will be a new gallery devoted to light-sensitive, ancient American textiles and featherwork, which will frame a 3,000-year history of achievements in the fiber arts.
“The new Rockefeller Wing will illuminate the rich cultures that brought life to these collections and create connections for the many diverse and far-flung communities they represent,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “From critical discoveries regarding the textiles and pigments used in pre-Hispanic art, to providing new insights into the social, political, and historical contexts of the artists who created these works, the reinstallation of our Arts of the Ancient Americas galleries will foreground new scholarship that deepens understanding and engagement with our collection.”
The new installation is the result of a close, eight-year collaboration with colleagues across Latin America. The renovated galleries will reflect recent advances in scholarship, incorporating knowledge about artists, their materials, their techniques, and their social roles and newly revealed relationships between regions. The galleries will also be more expansive in scope and consider Indigenous traditions in the Viceregal (Colonial) period, while also benefiting from new perspectives on indigenous concepts of the natural world, as well as nuanced perceptions of gender roles. Where possible, indigenous texts—ancient, historical, and modern—have informed the curatorial narrative, enriching the interpretation and appreciation of the works in the collection.
Joanne Pillsbury, the Andrall E. Pearson Curator of the Arts of the Ancient Americas said, “Since the Museum's founding, the presence of these works at The Met has reflected shifting sensibilities about the place of ancient American art in a global history of art. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen a revolution in our understanding of the Inca, the Classic Maya, and the other great cultures that thrived in Latin America before the 16th century, including the identification of specific, named artists. It has been exciting to work with scholars from across the Americas to reconceive the galleries in light of this new knowledge.”
Gallery Design and Experience
At the primary entrance to the galleries for the Arts of the Ancient Americas, visitors will encounter an animated map that provides an overview of the hemisphere from the first waves of migrations to the Americas over 20,000 years ago to the present day, emphasizing the rise of cultural traditions, colonial transformations, and the movement of people and ideas through history. This digital feature aims to visually convey the relationship between these ancient cultures and contemporary communities—including Latin American diasporas in the United States—and highlight the continuing presence of Indigenous communities in the Americas.
Laura Filloy Nadal, Curator of the Arts of the Ancient Americas, said: “Today, the artistic diversity in these galleries mirrors constellations of contemporary ethnicities and nationalities that are at the core of New York’s social fabric. Although these works were created by Indigenous artists centuries ago, their descendants—often carrying a multicultural heritage—thrive in New York today.”
Visitors will be greeted by a striking stone monument from Teotihuacan—a vast, cosmopolitan city that thrived in Central Mexico in the first six centuries CE. Considered the birthplace of the gods by the Mexica (also known as Aztec), Teotihuacan, with its extensive program of mural painting and bold, distinctive sculptural style, became an important site of pilgrimage by the 15th century. The Mexica’s own artistic achievements are celebrated through the presentation of monumental ritual sculptures and delicate luxury arts created from shell, semiprecious stones, and gold.
The redesigned galleries are organized roughly chronologically and geographically. To the west, visitors will find the oldest objects in the collection: finely carved lithic objects known as bannerstones, some made as long ago as 4,000 BCE; delicate ivory implements of the Old Bering Sea tradition; and female figurines from coastal Ecuador. To the east, visitors will encounter the bold imperial styles of the Mexica and the Inca, the two largest empires of the ancient Americas.
A highlight of the Central Park–adjacent galleries is a painted stone relief featuring a scene from a Maya royal court. This relief, the only work in the ancient American galleries that bears the signature of an artist—the Maya artist Chakalte', active about 750–800 CE—also bears traces of its original pigment, reminding us that many of these stone monuments were originally brightly painted. A special in-gallery digital feature will address the original context and its inscription, accentuating the politics and pomp of courtly life of the Maya world in the 770s.
Other highlights of the galleries for the Arts of the Ancient Americas include the comprehensive presentation of works of art in metal—works that reveal the technological sophistication and aesthetic achievements of artists in ancient Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico. A special in-gallery digital feature illuminates the development of complex metal-working technologies deployed in northern Peru to achieve dazzling results, including elements of a warrior’s regalia.
New Gallery Dedicated to Ancient Andean Textiles
One of the major innovations of the new galleries for the Arts of the Ancient Americas is a gallery to display ancient Andean textiles—the first of its kind in the United States. Intricately woven garments and hangings—some older than 2,000 years—will be shown in a gallery with state-of-the art casework and lighting, adjacent to the galleries for Modern and Contemporary Art. These delicate, light-sensitive textiles and featherworks will be rotated periodically, allowing for a dynamic presentation of one of the world’s great fiber arts traditions.
Weaving is one of the oldest and most complex art forms from the Andes, extending thousands of years before the rise of the Inca Empire (1470–1532), and arguably the most highly esteemed of the mediums. The region also boasts one of the most diverse approaches to textile construction known globally. Drawing on a wide repertoire of geometric and figurative designs, weavers developed strikingly bold compositions for textiles that were intended for, among other things, use as everyday objects, royal gifts, and sacred offerings. A highlight of the collection will be the presentation of nine monumentally scaled panels made from the feathers of blue-and-yellow macaws—strikingly bold compositions likely intended to grace a grand building.
Planning and Partnerships
With support from the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation, the initial international planning meeting for the galleries for the Arts of the Ancient Americas was held in Mexico City in 2018, hosted by the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the Museo del Templo Mayor. This meeting was followed by subsequent scholarly exchanges in New York and at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and across Latin America with archaeologists, artists, anthropologists, and other leading thinkers who are engaged with advanced research on the visual arts of Latin America before 1600. This collaboration from the inception of the project has substantially broadened and deepened understandings of the collection and informed its presentation and interpretation, particularly as archaeological and art-historical research on the ancient Americas has vastly expanded in the four decades since the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing opened, in 1982.
These new understandings that have been informed by the input from colleagues from across the country and Latin America will be reflected in the reinstalled galleries. Scholars and artists from diverse backgrounds collaborated with the curatorial team in a series of conversations around the artworks and the continuing importance of these ancient traditions in the Americas today. These discussions were instrumental in the conceptualization of the galleries, the selection of objects, and the development of the narratives.
“These convenings have been vital for recognizing museums as places for ongoing conversations about our histories and our world today. The conversations have helped us all contextualize our own institutions and forge deeper partnerships for the years ahead,” adds Ulla Holmquist Pachas, Director of the Museo Larco in Lima, Peru.
“These gatherings challenged us all to consider how we make ancient traditions relevant to our lives today. Through these conversations, we could collectively consider the ways in which these great traditions were foundational to our world,” notes Patricia Ledesma Bouchan, Director of the Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City.
Conservation
As part of the renovation project, numerous works were the subject of in-depth scholarly study by curators in concert with members of the Department of Objects Conservation and the Department of Scientific Research, as well as conservation staff in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.
Led by The Met’s Senior Research Specialist, Hugo Ikehara-Tsukayama, in collaboration with Peru, these studies yielded important new insights into the materials and methods employed by artists in the ancient Americas. New discoveries, such as the presence of traces of what were once bright pigments on Mexica sculpture, or the revelation of the distant sources of the dyes used to create dazzling garments of the Wari Empire (600–900 CE), have broadened our understandings of the appearance and meanings of these works.
The Arts of the Ancient Americas Collection
When the Arts of the Ancient Americas galleries reopen in May 2025, the new permanent installation will represent almost 5,000 years of history from North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. The majority of the artworks in these galleries were created between 1200 BCE and 1600 CE in Mesoamerica south to the Andean region and produced in a variety of media, from monumental stone sculpture to delicate featherwork.
History
The Met’s first galleries devoted to the Arts of the Ancient Americas opened in the late 19th century. As early as 1873, Mexican stone sculpture and Peruvian ceramics were gifts to The Met from diplomats and artists, including one of the Museum’s founders, the American painter Frederic Church. Much of the collection was later removed from view and sent on long-term loan to the American Museum of Natural History, losing its designation as art in the process.
It was not until the opening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in 1982 that the Museum began to exhibit the art of Latin America before European colonization in a sustained and comprehensive way.
The Met’s collection of ancient American art offers a far-reaching survey of outstanding examples of the major traditions, including a rare Maya sculpture in wood; a 1,000-year-old zemí figure from the Caribbean; and perhaps the finest synoptic collection of works of art in gold known anywhere.
Further reading on the history of the ancient American collection is available in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, vol. 56 (2021); and for more information about the history of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, see The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
Ancient American Art Across The Met
The new galleries will expand the scope of what is often called “Pre-Columbian art,” and strictly defined as the arts of Latin America prior to the European invasions after 1492, to consider Indigenous traditions in the Viceregal (Colonial) period, such the continued use of Inca tapestry-woven garments in ecclesiastical contexts, or the simultaneous use of Indigenous toponyms (place signs) and Spanish text on a stone monument. The story of these continuities and ruptures is one that is also represented across the Museum.
Works from across North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean are found across more than half of The Met’s 19 collecting areas, including: The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and the new galleries for the Arts of the Ancient Americas; European Paintings; the American Wing; Arms and Armor; the Costume Institute; Drawings and Prints; European Sculpture and Decorative Arts; Modern and Contemporary Art; Musical Instruments; and Photographs. Since 2018, The Met’s Native American collections—items created by indigenous artists in what is now the United States—have been presented primarily in the American Wing.
About the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing
The Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—40,000 square feet on the Museum’s south side—includes the three distinct collections of the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania, displaying them as discrete elements in an overarching wing that is in dialogue with the Museum’s collection as a whole.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the American statesman and philanthropist Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller assembled a fine-arts survey of other-than-Western art traditions that included the ancient Americas as well as areas of the world not represented in the Museum’s collection, notably African and Oceanic art. In 1969, it was announced that Rockefeller’s collection would be transferred to The Met as a new department and wing. Opened to the public in 1982, the addition was named after Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael C. Rockefeller, who was greatly inspired by the cultures and art of the Pacific and pursued new avenues of inquiry into artistic practice during his travels there. Among the wing’s signature works are the striking Asmat sculptures he researched and collected in southwest New Guinea.
In addition to the galleries for the Arts of the Ancient Americas, the new galleries for Oceanic art will include signature monumental works from New Guinea as well as a suite of more intimate spaces dedicated to island cultures, while the Arts of Africa galleries will present a survey of major visual traditions developed across sub-Saharan Africa and their interface with the Greek and Roman art galleries providing an opportunity for new considerations of Africa in antiquity. The reenvisioning of each of these suites of galleries builds on international planning workshops and consultation with dozens of local and international leaders in the arts and humanities. Recorded interviews with an interdisciplinary cohort of experts and well-known thought leaders and personalities will be featured in audio guides, available in both English and Spanish, podcasts, and new digital content. Spanish-language gallery texts will also be available online.
For more information about the new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.
Related Programs
The Met will host an opening festival to celebrate the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing on Saturday, May 31. More details will be announced.
Following the reopening of the galleries, The Met will present an international symposium highlighting the new archaeological discoveries that have dramatically transformed our understanding of the arts of the ancient Americas.
To mark the occasion of the re-opening of the Arts of the Ancient Americas galleries, MetLiveArts along with Carnegie Hall Co-Commissioned a new work, Tetluikan: Canto a la Piedra, by Gabriela Ortiz with a libretto by Mardonio Carballo—a contemporary Nahuatl poet. The work is specifically written for the award-winning a cappella vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. More information about this performance will be announced at a later date.
Credits
We thank all who have made possible the renovation of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, including leadership commitments from The Carson Family Charitable Trust, Kyveli and George Economou, Bobby Kotick, Drs. Daniel and Marian Malcolm, Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan, Samuel H. and Linda M. Lindenbaum, Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, The Marron Family, Naddisy Foundation, the City of New York, the Estate of Abby M. O’Neill, Andrall E. Pearson and Rappaport Family, the Estate of Ruth J. Prager, Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer, Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor and Gabriela Pérez Rocchietti, Alejandro and Charlotte Santo Domingo, and Helena and Per Skarstedt. Major support was provided by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Lockwood Chilton, Jr., Mariana and Raymond Herrmann, Mary R. Morgan, and Laura G. and James J. Ross.
Programming related to the reopening of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing is made possible by the Ford Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
The renovation of the galleries was overseen by Alisa LaGamma, Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator of African Art and Curator in Charge of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and Doris Zhao, Project Manager.
The Arts of the Ancient Americas team includes: Laura Filloy Nadal, Curator of the Arts of the Ancient Americas; Joanne Pillsbury, Andrall E. Pearson Curator of the Arts of the Ancient Americas; and Hugo Ikehara Tsukayama, Senior Research Associate.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing team includes: David Rhoads, Christine Giuntini, Lauren Posada, Raychelle Osnato, Damien Marzocchi, Jessi Atwood, Matthew Noiseux, Paige Silva, Lydia Shaw.
The conservation of these collections was overseen by Lisa Pilosi, Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge with conservators Dawn Kriss, Sara Levin, Amanda Chau, Katharine Fugett, Teresa Jiménez-Millas, Caitlin Mahony, Marijn Manuels, Katherine McFarlin, Nick Pedemonti, Carolyn Riccardelli, Netanya Schiff, Chantal Stein, Ahmed Tarek, Marlene Yandrisevits, with additional help from the Objects Conservation Department, as well as a team of conservation preparators dedicated to the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing collection: Matthew Cumbie, Nisha Bansil, Johnny Coast, Jennifer Groch, Lindsay Rowinski, Nina Ruelle, Barbara Smith and staff preparators Warren Bennet, Andy Estep, Jacob Goble and Frederick Sager.
The Met’s Design team, overseen by Alicia Cheng, Head of Design, includes: Patrick Herron, Alexandre Viault, Tiffany Kim, Anna Rieger, Maanik Chauhan, Sarah Parke, Clint Coller, Jourdan Ferguson, Amy Nelson, with support from Rebecca Forgac.
The design of the Michael C Rockefeller Wing was led by WHY Architecture, in collaboration with The Met’s Design Department. Beyer Blinder Belle was the executive architect and led the design of the exterior sloped glazing wall. The construction was managed by AECOM Tishman. The team collaborated with engineers including Kohler Ronan, Thornton Tomasetti, and Arup. The cases were fabricated by Goppion. The design and construction process was led by Justin Mayer (Senior Project Manager, Capital Projects) and Mabel Taylor (Associate Project Manager) of The Met's Capital Projects department overseen by Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli (Vice President, Capital Projects.
About The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day—who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met displays tens of thousands of objects covering 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.
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October 7, 2024
Contact: Meryl Cates; Ann Bailis
Communications@metmuseum.org
Rendering of Arts of the Ancient Americas Galleries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image by WHY Architecture