Tomorrow, The Met re-opens its David C. Rockefeller wing following a complete re-envisioning of its collections of the Arts of Africa, the Ancient Americas, and Oceania. Featuring over 1,800 works spanning five continents and hundreds of cultures, these three major world traditions stand as independent entities in a wing that is in dialogue with neighboring gallery spaces. The galleries have been closed to the public and under renovation since 2021, and will reopen to the public on May 31, 2025, with a daylong celebratory festival.

Highlights of the collections that are well known to long-time visitors to The Met are showcased in innovative ways with a completely new gallery design, which also incorporates filtered daylight through a custom-designed, state-of-the-art sloped glass wal on the south facade, adjacent to Central Park. Additionally, across each collection, there are objects on view for the first time, including major new acquisitions of historic and contemporary art in the Arts of Africa galleries; a gallery dedicated to light-sensitive ancient Andean textiles, which are the first of its kind in the United States; and several new commissions for the Oceania galleries by Indigenous artists and a range of new digital features that present contemporary perspectives.

Designed by WHY Architecture in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle Architects LLP, and with The Met’s Design Department, the reimagined galleries have been designed to transform the visitor experience and incorporate innovative technologies that allow The Met to display objects in new ways. In galleries dedicated to each of the distinct collection areas, design elements reference and pay homage to the architectural vernaculars of each region:

Arts of Africa
The new galleries present some 500 original creations spanning from the Middle Ages to the present, including artworks such as a 12th-century CE fired clay figure shaped in Mali’s Inner Niger Delta to the fiber creation Bleu no. 1(2014) by Abdoulaye Konaté (born 1953, Diré, Mali), a critically acclaimed innovator based in Bamako, Mali. One-fourth of the works, which are new acquisitions given by donors to celebrate The Met’s capital project, are on display at The Met for the first time. Original films produced with Ethiopian-American filmmaker Sosena Solomon are displayed in the gallery as well as online and were undertaken in partnership with World Monuments Fund (WMF).

Arts of the Ancient Americas
The reinstallation in the Arts of the Ancient Americas galleries is organized around some 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 is reintroduced for a new generation of visitors while reflecting contemporary scholarship and research and providing greater illumination of the ancestral arts of Latin America and the Caribbeans. The new galleries include monumentalstone sculptures and exquisite metalwork and also include refined ceramic vessels; shimmering regalia of gold, shell, and semiprecious stone; and delicate sculptures of  wood.

Arts of Oceania
Featuring over 650 works from the Museum’s collection of Oceanic art, drawn from over 140 distinct cultures, which covers almost one-third of the earth’s surface and continues to capture the global imagination. These include monumental artworks from the large island of New Guinea and the coastal archipelagos that stretch beyond its shores to the north, central, and eastern Pacific, as well as the two neighboring regions of Australia and Island Southeast Asia, whose Indigenous communities all share a common ancestry. A significant set of acquisitions substantively broadens the media and cultural scope of works presented in the galleries. These include works that expand the curatorial narrative, recalibrating and balancing the former focus on ceremonial architecture and men’s ritual practice, by broadening the collection to include the work of women, especially fiber work by senior female artists from Australia and New Guinea.

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