New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art wants to offer its millions of visitors a view of the world that is less Western-oriented, a shift that will highlight works from Africa and the continent’s 3,000 years of cultural history.
This shift in perspective will also help the world’s fourth most visited museum – after the Louvre, the British Museum and the Vatican Museums – attract more African-American and diaspora visitors, Met chief executive and executive director Max Hollein told AFP in an interview.
The iconic museum, located on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park since 1870, hopes to thereby shine a brighter light on its 4,000 African works produced by more than 200 cultures from what are now nearly 40 southern African countries from the Sahara.
After spending tens of millions on renovations, the Met in the spring of 2025 will reopen its Michael K. Rockefeller Wing, which houses not only African art but also works from the South Pacific and the early Americas.
“We wanted to have a completely new architecture and scenography to show this work of art and especially African art,” said Hollein, a 54-year-old Austrian art historian and the first European to lead the Met.
He took over the reins of the Met in July 2023 as it recovered from the collapse in attendance during the pandemic. It attracted 5.4 million visitors last year, which is actually 10 percent more than pre-Covid 2019 numbers.
Hollein said the Rockefeller Wing, which opened in 1982, already represents a major shift to a “much broader perspective” for the museum, which was founded and funded by wealthy art lovers, businessmen and art collectors from Europe, Asia and The Middle East, as well as from ancient Greece and Rome.
– A less Eurocentric view –
But once the renovated and reimagined African Galleries open in 2025, they will mark “another milestone”.
The museum wants to “make sure we don’t just have a Western-centric or Eurocentric perspective,” Hollein said.
The Met has also expanded its reach by negotiating agreements with African counterparts, such as a 2023 agreement with the National Museums and Monuments Commission of Nigeria to help it digitize and catalog its holdings.
Working with African countries, the Met in 2020 organized an ambitious exhibition on the arts of the Sahelian empires of the Middle Ages (Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Segu) and a smaller one, which ended last month, on 1,000 years of the Byzantine Empire’s influence on the art of the Christians of Egypt, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Hollein said it’s time to move away from a Eurocentric view – to stop “simply looking at these objects because they influenced European modernism so much” or studying Maori sculptures only because “they fascinated French artists from the early 20th th century”.
– African Art, American Heritage –
To deepen his relationship with African art and better understand his works in their local context, Hollein traveled in late March to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, meeting with museum curators, art historians and contemporary artists.
He also visited some rare archaeological sites: Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of a medieval city in the south of that country, and the Tanzanian island of Kilwa Kisiwani, where the remains of another medieval city are now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Videos with updated information on the sites will be shown in the Met’s Rockefeller Wing.
Eager, like other American and European museums, to appeal to a younger and more diverse audience, the Met turned its attention to the multicultural mosaic that is New York—and in particular its population descended from enslaved peoples, as well as others recently arrived from Africa and the Caribbean.
“It’s the art of Africa, but at its core it’s also the cultural heritage of African-Americans in the United States,” Hollein said.
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