This post was originally published on artnews.com
The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently offered a preview of its renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, taking journalists on a tour of the new space, set to open next May.
“A lot of thought was placed into you know, how to break down the experience of engaging with these works in a way that will be more accessible,” Alisa LaGamma, Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, said during the press tour.
The new space is designed to be much brighter, easier to navigate and encourage visitors to flow from the museum’s adjacent galleries for modern and contemporary art, as well as Greek and Roman art.
“It really will feel like this is more integrated into the building at large, and so it won’t be its own thing,” LaGamma told ARTnews after the tour.
The Rockefeller art collection was transferred to the Met in 1969 and the wing first opened in 1982, designed by the architects at Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates. In 2016, architect Kulapat Yantrasast of the firm wHY was chosen to redesign the Rockefeller Wing’s 40,000-square-foot interior. Beyer Blinder Belle Architects LLP was the $70 million project’s executive architect and led the design of the wing’s exterior sloped glazing wall, also known as a curtain wall.
LaGamma described the previous design of the Rockefeller wing as “a big, gloomy, kind of modernist space” that resembled a Soho loft that had a “weird light grid” and “resembled a bit of a cave”. It was also purpose-built for a much smaller collection at only 3,000 works. The wing’s original interior design also had in-gallery storage, which meant “hundreds of ceramic vessels” being stored in cupboards taking up valuable space and not on display. “We now have only space devoted to prime exhibition, and that allows us to really, in some cases, exhibit more works, and in other cases, give more space to the works that we’re presenting,” LaGamma said during the one-hour press tour.
Rockefeller’s collection has significantly expanded and grown through acquisitions, resulting in a split into the Arts of Oceania (2,800 objects), Arts of Africa (3,000 objects), and Arts of the Ancient Americas (7,000 objects).
“The nature of the collection has really changed since it arrived here,” LaGamma said. “We felt that the time had come to rethink our presentation, and also the infrastructure—the physical infrastructure of this section of the building needed significant shoring up. It was a marriage of physical need and also a conceptual rethinking.”
The multi-year process of renovating the Rockefeller Wing meant looking at the works in each collection and determining which spaces were going to work best, especially in terms of light exposure.
“It was really about looking at the scale of the art and what could take light and what couldn’t, and sort of customizing the allocation,” LaGamma said.
One of the ways the galleries in the Rockefeller Wing were redesigned was through the creation of distinct spaces “within the spatial envelope,” with a main space purposely reminiscent of the knave of a cathedral. “You have all of these lateral chapels on the sides that are going to offer different chapters in history of sub Saharan African art,” LaGamma said during the press tour.
When Nelson Rockefeller initially put together his survey for African art, it was focused on figurative sculpture and masks. “If you are engaged with the region as a field, you realize textiles are just as important, and so we’ve done massive collecting of textiles and ceramics and other kinds of decorative arts to give a more balanced perspective,” LaGamma said, noting a third of the works exhibited in the reopened Africa galleries will be brand new and on display for the first time. “In these new galleries, you’ll continuously have a selection of varied media which you didn’t really have before.”
That media includes more information about the artists themselves, including details from Michael Rockefeller’s own diaries and notes. “He took portraits and photographic portraits of artists with their works and recorded their names and a lot of the exegesis about meaning of iconography and specific motifs,” Oceanic Art curator Maia Nuku said, noting a short film will show a story about the archive from Michael Rockefeller himself describing how the collection came together and traveled to New York.
The Rockefeller Wing’s sloped, glazed glass wall facing Central Park had also been shuttered for most of the years the space was open to the public due to its south facing direction.
“The light was too harsh for the interface with the light-sensitive collections that were positioned in its pathway,” LaGamma said.
“We had condensation and all kinds of issues on the inside, and then huge energy loss on the outside because it was facing south,” added Brett Gaillard, the museum’s head of capital planning.
After an energy analysis, two public hearings, five community boards, many mockups, and material studies, the museum did a complete, weather-tight triple-glazed replacement of the original curtain wall. The replacement included bird frit—a ceramic paint applied to glass making it safer for birds—and a feature now required by the New York City Building Code. “We had a trustee tell us, ‘you have to do this’,” Gaillard said during the press tour.
There will also be light-diffusing panels placed in front of the wall and digitally-controlled blinds to help manage light exposure.
Overall, the redesign of the Rockefeller Wing, according to LaGamma, is about how the Metropolitan Museum of Art can provide a better curatorial experience to visitors, improve the museum’s structural integrity and energy efficiency, as well as strategically integrate the area into the rest of the institution despite multiple constraints.
“Institutions have to live with decisions that were made by previous generations, so we don’t have the flexibility to move the African art to put it adjacent to the Egyptian wing,” LaGamma said. “We can be more intentional in terms of the messaging that we provide our visitors that this is a legacy, that these three collections are side by side, and we are trying to really emphasize an outward look and not just an inward one.”