The Met treats African art as art, not ethnography
For decades Western museums filed African, Oceanic, and American objects as "primitive" specimens. After Nelson Rockefeller's gift of more than three thousand works, the Met opened a dedicated wing in 1982 that judged those pieces on aesthetic terms—inside an encyclopedic American museum that now draws over five million visitors a year.
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art—the Met—is an encyclopedic house and, by floor area, the third-largest museum worldwide and the biggest art museum in the Americas. Fiscal 2025 brought 5,727,258 visitors, first in the United States and fifth among art museums globally. The permanent collection once topped two million works and now lists about 1.5 million across seventeen curatorial departments. The main pile at 1000 Fifth Avenue along Museum Mile spans roughly two million square feet, begun in 1880; The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park holds medieval Europe; a planned 2028 merger would absorb Neue Galerie's early twentieth-century Austrian and German holdings. Founded in 1870 by philanthropists, artists, and businessmen who wanted a national school for the public, it ranges from ancient Near East and Egypt through Old Masters to contemporary work, plus instruments, costumes, textiles, and armor.
Near Eastern holdings grew from a handful of tablets to more than seven thousand pieces spanning Neolithic times through the Sasanian collapse—Sumerian, Hittite, Assyrian, and more—including Ashurnasirpal II's monumental lamassu. Asian art exceeds 35,000 objects across a 64,500-square-foot wing covering five millennia; Chinese works alone top 14,000, with more gallery space than any museum outside China, according to curator Maxwell Hearn. Douglas Dillon's board leadership from 1970 and Wen Fong's collecting strategy rebuilt a once-weak department. The Astor Court, a Ming-style garden court opened in 1981 and modeled on Suzhou's Master of the Nets Garden, was the first of its kind outside China.
Peruvian antiquities arrived as early as 1882, but a concerted Africa–Oceania–Americas program waited until 1969, when then-governor Nelson Rockefeller donated his collection of more than 3,000 pieces—after earlier founding a Museum of Primitive Art when the Met showed little interest. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, named for the son who died collecting in New Guinea, opened in 1982 with over 11,000 works in 40,000 square feet, presenting non-Western making from about 3000 BCE to the present as art judged aesthetically. A $70 million renovation begun after December 2021 aimed to reinstall those galleries, including some 3,000 displayed works and a repaired glass curtain. The Met's reach is encyclopedic; its categories keep being renegotiated.
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
