NEW YORK, NY.- The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has been closed and under renovation since 2021, is not scheduled to open until May 2025. But a recent early peek at the wing’s refurbished galleries already reveals brighter, more open exhibition spaces for the museum’s storied collection of objects from Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania — including stone sculptures, detailed metalwork and colorful ceramic vessels.

Perhaps most strikingly, the $70 million renovation designed by WHY Architecture and Beyer Blinder Belle Architects is now presenting the three areas as distinct in their own right, rather than grouped together under the archaic rubric of “primitive,” as they were in the past.

“Back then, these works were seen as the non-Western, ‘the other,’” Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, said in an interview, adding, “our perspective has evolved.”

The collection, assembled by philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller,​ was given to the Met in 1969 as a new department and wing, with more than 3,000 objects. It opened in 1982, with a dramatic floor-to-roof wall of glass. The wing was named for Rockefeller’s son Michael C. Rockefeller, who disappeared at age 23 in 1961 on a collecting expedition among the Asmat, a group from southwestern New Guinea. (The exhibition at the Met will include nine soaring carved Asmat poles.)

The wing’s 16 galleries also aim to reintroduce the collection in the context of the global canon of art history, highlighting with its Africa collection, for example, connections with Greek, Roman and European sculpture and decorative arts.

“We’re emphasizing that the history of connectivity between Europe during the Renaissance and the ancient world and Africa is, content-wise, actually more relevant than the adjacency to the ancient Americas or Oceania,” said Alisa LaGamma, the curator of African Art and the curator in charge of the Rockefeller Wing.

“There is a generational mindset that has changed,” she added, “in terms of wanting to layer in all kinds of new content that will be meaningful.”

With more than 1,800 works on view from five continents and hundreds of cultures, the refreshed wing will feature new scholarship, a gallery dedicated to light-sensitive ancient Andean textiles (said to be the first such dedicated gallery in the United States), several new commissions for the Oceania galleries by Indigenous artists, and a range of new digital features that will present contemporary perspectives.

The galleries will also feature new acquisitions. About a third of the works that will be on display when the wing reopens, for example, are recent donations to the collection, LaGamma said.

Maia Nuku, the curator for the Arts of Oceania, said the Met hopes to convey the meaning and significance of the objects on view, such as “spiritual voyaging and the way that a lot of these artworks are really designed as vehicles to transition across thresholds, rites of passage, mortuary ceremonies that take you from life to death, or initiation from being a young boy to an adult.”

Nuku said she also sought to focus on geographical connections as well as the importance of materials — “Why particular feathers? Why particular fibers?”

“You start to see the relationship between the western part of Papua New Guinea and the ancestral cultures of Taiwan, the Philippines, Sumatra, Borneo,” she said.

“We’ve been acquiring historic and contemporary fiber work by senior female artists to just recalibrate that and balance it out, because you don’t get the male without the female in the Pacific,” Nuku added. “It was a part of the story that wasn’t available before.”

Joanne Pillsbury, the curator of the Arts of the Ancient Americas, said she was excited by the new sloped glass wall on the south facade, adjacent to Central Park (the previous glass wall did not protect the art from UV rays, so the museum had to keep the blinds down). “It’s an exciting opportunity for us because so many of the works in the collection of the Arts of the Ancient Americas were works that were meant to be seen in daylight,” she said. “And they really come alive in a new way in natural light.”

We asked the curators to show us some of the treasured works that will be displayed for the first time in the Rockefeller Wing’s three sections when it opens to the public next spring.

ARTS OF THE ANCIENT AMERICAS

“The renovation allowed us to create a dedicated gallery for textiles from the ancient Andes, and to show some extraordinary works, some over 1,000 years old,” said Pillsbury. “Men’s garments were often the finest example, and some would have required over a year of a weaver’s time. The designs of the finest involve complex symmetries where a single motif is repeated, reversed, rotated to form dazzling compositions.”

This delicate pendant has the body of an aquatic mammal, but with appendages terminating in heads. It was likely made in what is now Costa Rica or Panama, “but in 1884 it was found far to the north, at Chichén Itzá, on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico,” said Laura Filloy Nadal, curator of the Arts of the Ancient Americas. “It is a tiny object that reminds us that these precious works were often carried great distances as trade items, or, as likely here, as an offering to a sacred place.”

ARTS OF AFRICA

The new African galleries give pride of place to textile and ceramic traditions that have flourished across sub-Saharan Africa. “Kente is among the most familiar aesthetics associated with Africa, and yet few examples of the royal versions woven from silk have survived over the generation,” LaGamma said. “The genre developed using cotton fibers and muted palettes, and over time harnessed imported silks to produce glorious compositions.”

“Moon Masks, the creations of Baule sculptors, are among the most iconic associated with African art for their elegant refinement,” LaGamma said. “Works such as this jewel were produced as an accent for a theatrical entertainment by masked dancers evoking the known world, from impersonations of abstract forces to those of local leaders.”

ARTS OF OCEANIA

This Awyu shield from the western half of New Guinea was cut from a flat section of mangrove tree. “Awyu shields are distinctive for their leaflike form and have great character, with lively characteristics designed to overwhelm or awe opponents during a conflict or raiding party,” Nuku said.

“This spectacular example of a beaded ceremonial panel — sereu — from northwest New Guinea is a transformative acquisition, the first beaded textile from New Guinea to enter the Met’s Oceanic art collection,” Nuku said. “The vivid designs incorporate triangular motifs and square renditions of coils or spirals, arranged in motifs that speak to cosmology and the Pleiades star constellation.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.