When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City reopened its Michael C. Rockefeller Wing to the press on Wednesday, May 28, the occasion did not just mark the culmination of an extensive and costly four-year renovation project. It was also the first time that Chief Mathew Kuarchinj and Tobi Borungai, Kwoma artists from the Papua New Guinea village of Mariwai, saw the Ceremonial House Ceiling that their elder family members had created over half a century ago.
Consisting of around 170 uniquely designed bark and palm leaf paintings known as pangal, the 80-foot-long work is the largest contemporary art commission in the museum’s collection. Suspended from the newly unveiled gallery ceiling, the cathedralesque canopy is an example of the decorative roofs that cover sacred spirit houses across Papua New Guinea. Considered a living artwork, it is adorned with colorful clan emblems, natural motifs, and spiritual iconography that were created by Kwoma artists in the early 1970s on commission by Douglas Newton, The Met’s first curator of Oceanic art. These artists included Borungai’s father, who painted two panels featuring blue and yellow inverted faces and circular stacks.
“We are artists; we carry our village and the story of our place to the museum house,” Kuarchinj and Borungai, who hail from the Kiava and Wanyi clans, told Hyperallergic in a WhatsApp message. Initially, they said, the ceiling’s far distance from Mariwai troubled them, but the recent reunion helped assuage their worries.
“We told them, ‘It’s okay, the spirits can stay in New York and meet the people from all over the world who will come to say hello,’” Kuarchinj and Borungai said.
Right: Shiva Lynn Burgos, Tobi Borungai, Met curator Maia Nuku, Met Director Max Hollein, and Chief Mathew Kuarchinj looking up at the Ceremonial Ceiling
The ceiling’s redisplay is part of a $70 million renovation of the galleries housing The Met’s Oceanic, ancient American, and African art collections in the South-facing, 40,000-square-foot Rockefeller Wing. It was overseen by Thailand-born architect Kulapat Yantrasast of the firm WHY Architecture, who previously worked on renovating the Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History across Central Park and expanding San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle Architects LLP and The Met’s Design Department. The overhaul of the wing consists of a reconfigured floorplan, architectural elements like beamed ceilings and glass gallery dividers, updated wall texts, and supplemental digital features, as well as new art commissions.
It’s a pivot away from the complicated history that has plagued the Rockefeller Wing collections. The new wing’s namesake, Michael C. Rockefeller, infamously disappeared during an expedition in New Guinea in 1961. His father, former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, founded the egregiously named Museum of Primitive Art and ordered the destruction of Diego Rivera’s 1933 mural for the Rockefeller Center over its depiction of Vladimir Lenin.
The Met’s long-overdue renovation also builds on recent initiatives that have begun to address its problematic record of collecting looted cultural artifacts. Questions remain surrounding certain objects on view, namely the suite of bronze and ivory sculptures that were violently looted from the West African Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by British forces, including a prized pendant mask of Ìyọ́bà Idià. Next to the display, a wall text addresses the history of this punitive expedition and references The Met’s 2021 repatriation of two of its Benin Bronzes, during which it entered a shared agreement with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
The Met did not respond to Hyperallergic’s questions regarding the Benin Bronzes on display.
The museum’s ongoing collaboration with the Kwoma community through the Mariwai Project is part of a cultural heritage preservation initiative founded in 2014 by artist Shiva Lynn Burgos. For the redisplay of the Kwoma ceiling, The Met was guided by descendants of the work’s original painters and the late Chief Paul Yapmunggwiyo Kwanggi, the last living artist to have worked on the ceiling panels.
Before his death last year, Kwanggi played a pivotal role in reinstalling the work, now organized according to clan identity and spiritual hierarchy and shaped as a turtle shell and a flying fox, both Kiava clan symbols.
A notable change in the Rockefeller Wing renovation has been the relocation of many exhibits, such as a group of hallowed Asmat wooden works including towering funerary poles and outstretched canoes that were previously threatened by sunlight that spilled from the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows. These objects have now been moved to an interior gallery, and new acquisitions from Papua New Guinea, including bark cloth panels (nioge) created by the Omïe women’s collective in the Oro Province, have taken their place under the Kwoma ceiling panels. On the other side of a partition that divides the naturally lit space are stone, metal, and ceramic artifacts from the Ancient American collection as well as 8th-century Maya stone monuments that were on display in The Met’s Great Hall until last year.
The reconfiguration of displays has notably led to the resizing of the Kwoma house ceiling, which previously consisted of 270 paintings, to accommodate the proportions of the new gallery space and layout of art displays. The gallery’s redesign has opened up space beneath the Kwoma house ceiling installation. Burgos noted that the redesign has allowed the ceiling to “fulfill its function as a house of assembly.” It has also contextualized the work by way of an adjacent digital monitor that delves into its history and the ongoing Mariwai Project, which in 2016 helped facilitate the construction of the spirit house ceiling’s living twin, Tokimba.
“The reinstallation of the Kwoma Ceremonial Ceiling is a perfect example of a transformative thinking in new museum engagement practices, integral to what I call ‘Ancestral Futurisms,’” Burgos told Hyperallergic.
“The beauty of the ceiling reflects a deep cultural collaboration, empowering both the artistry and the spiritual significance of our living traditions which remain very much alive, and a contemporary art intervention by way of its redesign for 2025,” Burgos added.
