Rethinking the Display of Non-Western Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Rockefeller Wing, the Art-Anthropology Divide, and the Struggle to Present Non-Western Works with Both Aesthetic Power and Cultural Depth
Every object in a museum tells a story – but what story should a museum tell?
A great museum is never neutral. It is a storyteller with the power to shape how entire cultures are seen. Nowhere is that power more visible—or more contested—than in the encyclopedic museum’s display of non-Western art.
The challenge is stark: how to present these objects as works of extraordinary artistry and craftsmanship while also honoring them as living expressions of history, belief, and cultural identity.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly reimagined Michael Rockefeller Wing—home to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and Ancient America—offers a striking case study in the tensions and possibilities of museum display in the 21st century.
With its soaring ceilings, crisp sight lines, and floods of natural light, the redesigned wing is nothing short of a visual and spatial triumph: light-filled, airy, and impeccably staged. Yet curiously, as a friend noted, nowhere are the architects or exhibition designers credited—a telling omission in a museum world that now celebrates curatorial authorship and interpretive voice but often neglects to acknowledge the hand that shapes the viewer’s physical experience.
The galleries exude a spare elegance. The objects are displayed with the reverence of high art: pedestals isolated in pools of light, masks suspended as if floating, altars and totems given the kind of breathing room normally reserved for Rodin or Giacometti. Labels are placed discreetly, almost self-effacingly, in order not to distract from the works themselves.
This intentional unobtrusiveness has an unintended consequence: the labels are very difficult to read. The effect is both a literal and metaphorical distancing—viewers must lean in to grasp the curators’ words, just as they must navigate between two interpretive frames that the exhibition never fully reconciles.
Notably, the interpretive texts are not “woke” in the accusatory sense sometimes leveled at museums today. They refrain from moralizing about colonial extraction or dwelling on the often-problematic histories of acquisition. Nor do they foreground the geopolitical asymmetries between the “Western” institutions that hold these works and the “global South” cultures that produced them.
Instead, the emphasis is on the objects themselves—on their formal qualities, their cultural functions, and their place within broader systems of meaning. In an era when many institutions feel compelled to foreground restitution debates and postcolonial critique, the Met has chosen a less polemical approach.
Still, the curators’ dilemma is evident. Should these objects be presented primarily as works of art—evaluated for their beauty, craft, and influence on modernism? Or should they be contextualized as ethnographic artifacts—integral to religious cosmologies, political systems, and ceremonial life?
The Rockefeller Wing attempts both. The lighting, spacing, and staging encourage aesthetic contemplation, in line with the Met’s identity as an art museum. Yet the labels, dense with information on governance structures, mythologies, spiritual practices, and regional traditions, pull the viewer toward anthropology.
Since its 18th century founding, the museum has played multiple roles. It is a cabinet of curiosity, an Enlightenment “world museum” with universalist ambitions, a collector of objects from every corner of the globe, and an educational institution charged with introducing visitors to unfamiliar cultures.
These roles can enrich one another—but in the Rockefeller Wing, they also collide. The universalist vision invites sweeping comparisons across time and geography, placing a Sepik River mask and a Greek kouros in the same grand narrative of human beauty. The educational mission, by contrast, demands cultural specificity—insisting we see each work in the light of the community that created and used it.
The Dilemmas Facing the Contemporary Encyclopedic Museum
The reimagined Rockefeller Wing is more than a showcase for African, Ancient American, and Oceanic art. It is a case study in the dilemmas that define encyclopedic museums in the 21st century.
These institutions, heirs to Enlightenment ambitions and imperial collecting, now operate in a radically changed cultural landscape. They must balance aesthetics with accountability, universalism with cultural sovereignty, beauty with truth. The Rockefeller Wing makes that balancing act visible—sometimes triumphantly, sometimes uneasily.
Here, I want to examine the tangled set of tensions that the Rockefeller Wing—and its counterparts in London, Paris, and Berlin—must navigate: how to celebrate artistic brilliance while confronting histories of colonial plunder; how to honor the spiritual and cultural meanings of objects while situating them in an aesthetic frame; how to engage global audiences without flattening cultural difference; and how to act as stewards of world heritage in an age that demands restitution, transparency, and repair.
▪ The Art–Anthropology Divide
Among the oldest challenges for the encyclopedic museum lies at the heart of the Rockefeller Wing: the inherited separation between “fine art” and “ethnographic artifact.”
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western art museums drew a bright line between the two. Oil paintings, marble sculpture, and gold chalices were celebrated as “art”—objects valued for their aesthetic qualities, formal innovations, and connection to individual genius.
Ritual masks, carved poles, and woven textiles from Africa, Oceania, or the Americas were consigned to natural history or ethnographic collections, displayed as cultural evidence rather than as artistic creation.
This division was never neutral. It reflected a colonial hierarchy of value—implying that some civilizations produced “art,” others only “artifacts.” Even when so-called “primitive” works fired the imaginations of modernists like Picasso and Brancusi, they were rarely given equal standing in the same galleries as Western art. The non-Western object could inspire, but it could not stand beside the European masterpiece as an equal partner in the canon.
▪ Artistry vs. Cultural Meaning
For the encyclopedic museum, beauty is not an afterthought—the display of beautiful objects is at the heart of what it does. However else these institutions may educate, contextualize, or provoke, they begin with the conviction that works of art possess an intrinsic power to move us through their form, craftsmanship, and visual impact.
A Yoruba divination tray or Sepik River mask deserves to be seen as an object of consummate skill and visual power. Yet for their makers and users, these works were far more than art: they were sacred tools, political emblems, and conduits to the divine.
The challenge facing the museum is stark: should such works be displayed as timeless artistic achievements, or as artifacts rooted in specific histories, cosmologies, and social systems?
Too much contextual framing can make them feel like anthropological specimens; too little can turn them into decorative abstractions, stripped of their original force and functions.
▪ Aesthetic Impact vs. Interpretation
The new Rockefeller Wing deliberately straddles this artistic and ethnographic divide. Its galleries borrow the clean lines and dramatic lighting of the modernist “white cube,” isolating objects to encourage close looking, while also offering hints of their ceremonial life.
A Senufo helmet mask from West Africa might be given its own pedestal, the play of light emphasizing its sweeping curves and geometric abstraction. But nearby, a label notes its role in initiation rites, its symbolic layers, and the technical virtuosity of its makers.
The aim is double: to provoke visual awe and to spark anthropological curiosity. The risk is that either impulse might overpower the other. Lean too far toward the formalist and the object becomes a trophy; lean too far toward ethnography and the artistry gets lost under didacticism.
A display must honor an object’s artistry and its cultural meaning. Emphasize beauty too much, and you lose the lived world it came from; emphasize context too much, and you bury the art under explanation.
▪ Aesthetics vs. Accountability
Every acquisition, absence, and curatorial decision encodes values and power. Museums today face growing demands to confront the colonial origins of many of their holdings and to grapple with the stereotypes earlier displays perpetuated.
Much of the non-Western art in Western museums arrived under conditions of profound asymmetry. Some works were legitimately purchased or exchanged; others came as spoils of war, seized during punitive expeditions, or extracted under colonial governance. Many transactions were ambiguous—gifts under duress, purchases at fire-sale prices, or removals justified under the guise of preservation.
The Rockefeller Wing generally avoids confronting these acquisition histories in its labels, focusing instead on cultural origins and symbolic meaning. This choice spares visitors a barrage of grievance—but risks leaving the museum open to charges of evasion.
▪ The “Primitivism” Problem
No issue is more fraught than the legacy of “primitivism.” In the early 20th century, modernist artists turned to African, Oceanic, and Native American works for formal liberation from Renaissance perspective and academic realism. They found in these traditions a distilled energy and abstraction they felt was missing from European art.
But “primitivism” came freighted with colonial assumptions: that such works emerged from cultures “earlier” on the evolutionary ladder, lacking the complexity or self-consciousness of “civilized” societies. This framing simultaneously exalted and diminished the works—mining them for inspiration while denying them full equality as art.
The Rockefeller Wing’s response is oblique. Labels occasionally mention “influence” or “dialogue,” but stop short of naming the term. The gallery design itself—with spotlit objects presented as pure form—echoes modernist display strategies, inviting the same kind of decontextualized appreciation the modernists once practiced. The result is elegant, but it risks leaving old hierarchies intact unless visitors actively seek out the counter-narratives in the wall texts.
▪ Universalism vs. Centering Non-Western Knowledge
The encyclopedic museum was born of an Enlightenment ideal: gather the world’s art under one roof for the edification of all. It is a noble vision, but also a product of empire, dependent on the power to collect from afar.
Today, that ideal faces a crisis of legitimacy. Communities of origin are pressing for more than symbolic consultation; some demand shared authority or outright restitution. The Rockefeller Wing signals change—it elevates the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the museum’s spatial hierarchy, integrates contemporary works, and gestures toward collaboration. But the curatorial voice remains firmly the Met’s, its interpretive arc shaped in New York, not in Lagos, Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, or Cuzco.
The dilemma is structural: full pluralism would challenge the universalist premise, while strict universalism risks appearing as a relic of imperial hubris.
▪ Education vs. Enchantment
The Met has always balanced two missions: to educate and to enchant. In the Rockefeller Wing, modernist display fosters quiet contemplation; dense but discreet labels offer ceremonial, political, and cosmological context. This creates a “double vision”—the same mask as an abstract sculpture and as a spiritual conduit.
Yet there are trade-offs. Too much explanation risks dispelling the gallery’s aura; too little erases the object’s living context. Art museums often resist the immersive strategies of ethnographic displays—soundscapes, video, reconstructions—for fear of distracting from form. The Met flirts with environmental cues but stops short of full immersion.
▪ Selectivity and the Politics of Absence
What is shown shapes perception; what is absent shapes it just as much. In the Rockefeller Wing, the Africa on view is one of carved wood, fiber, and clay—the continent’s metallurgical brilliance is grossly underrepresented. Oceanic art tilts toward Melanesia; Polynesia is thinner. Ancient American galleries privilege the monumental and ornate over the everyday.
These omissions stem from the contingencies of collecting—what earlier collectors valued, what was available, what could be legally or ethically acquired. With acquisitions slowed by provenance scrutiny and political pressures, existing collections now bear the double weight of representing both artistic traditions and the history of collecting itself.
Transparency about these choices would not diminish beauty; it would deepen the encounter by showing how beautiful objects reached this place.
The Rockefeller Wing’s achievement is not in resolving these dilemmas, but in making them visible. It offers a rare space where the tensions of the encyclopedic museum—art and anthropology, beauty and politics, universalism and sovereignty—are on display alongside the objects themselves.
It asks visitors, implicitly, to decide where they stand in these debates, and whether the “museum of the world” can still speak for the world at all.
Rethinking the Encyclopedic Museum in a Post-Colonial World
Across the museum world, curators, scholars, and artists are asking the same question: if the encyclopedic museum was born in an age of empire, how should it evolve in an age shaped by post-colonial critique and demands for restitution?
Philippe de Montebello, the 89-year-old Met’s former director, still defends the Enlightenment ideal—that showing the world’s art side by side is the best way to understand human creativity as a shared inheritance.
But others counter that the “museum of the world” cannot be separated from the histories of extraction, violence, and inequality that made it possible. Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian philosopher, has called for museums to become “places of repair,” where the wounds of colonialism are acknowledged and addressed through both symbolic and material action, including restitution.
Mary Beard, the classicist, warns that museums can no longer pretend their collections floated into place free of politics—today’s audiences are too aware of provenance disputes and too skeptical of institutional authority.
Dan Hicks, archaeologist and author of The Brutish Museums, argues for “radical transparency,” making the history of acquisition—and the power imbalances it reveals—central to the display. His own Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has begun removing the jam-packed display cases of its Victorian heyday, not to strip away objects, but to create space for new interpretations and the voices of source communities.
Other curators are experimenting with co-authorship. The Nigerian-British curator Osei Bonsu, now at Tate Modern, has emphasized the need for museums to move beyond “inclusion” toward shared authority—inviting source communities to decide not only how objects are displayed, but whether they should be displayed at all.
Gifty Benson, a Nigerian-born museum educator, puts it simply: “It’s not about erasing the universal museum. It’s about changing who gets to write its captions.”
Artists, too, are pushing museums to rethink their role. The Congolese artist Sammy Baloji stages installations that pair ethnographic artifacts with contemporary African photography, forcing viewers to see the colonial gaze embedded in both.
Yinka Shonibare, the British-Nigerian artist known for his use of “African” Dutch wax fabrics, has spoken of museums as spaces that should “unsettle” rather than reassure—places where viewers can encounter beauty alongside the histories that shaped it.
Even within the Met, there is recognition that a shift is underway. Director Max Hollein talks of finding a “middle path”—preserving the encyclopedic vision while allowing “multiple entry points” into the stories objects tell. That might mean pairing historic works with contemporary responses from artists in the cultures they came from, integrating digital media that lets visitors hear from community members thousands of miles away, or foregrounding oral histories alongside curatorial analysis.
The art critic Holland Cotter has distilled the stakes: “The universal museum either becomes polyphonic, or it becomes a mausoleum.” For him, survival depends on turning the galleries into sites of conversation rather than pronouncement—accepting that the museum’s role is shifting from authoritative storyteller to host, facilitator, and, sometimes, listener.
From this perspective, the post-colonial museum does not need to choose between aesthetic display and politics. It must make space for both—and for the difficult truths that connect them. Its authority will no longer rest on having the last word, but on creating a setting where multiple worlds, and multiple ways of knowing, can be in the room at the same time.
Fully Embracing the Museum’s Educational Mission
The new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing is light-filled, airy, and stunning. It elevates the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas into the symbolic heart of the Met. But in today’s postcolonial moment, beauty alone isn’t enough.
Elevation without explanation—without context, without confrontation—isn’t progress. It’s decoration. If the Met is serious about rethinking its role, it must also rethink its purpose. The real challenge isn’t simply to showcase these works—it’s to help visitors see them differently: not just as masterful carvings or exquisite textiles, but as living expressions of belief, ritual, power, and resistance.
That means addressing, openly and without euphemism, the histories of violence, coercion, and asymmetry that brought many of them here. It also means resisting the temptation to present cultures as fixed in some timeless past, disconnected from their present-day realities.
In an age when the legacies of colonialism are under sustained public scrutiny, the encyclopedic museum can no longer rely on the silent authority of the white-walled gallery. Its survival, and its relevance, depend on embracing its educational mission more fully than ever. That means more than wall labels. It means giving visitors the tools—and the human contact—to engage deeply with the histories and meanings of what they see.
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has shown one way forward: stationing trained, knowledgeable individuals directly in the galleries, ready to answer questions, share histories, and connect objects to the cultures that created them.
This kind of human presence changes the dynamic from passive viewing to active conversation. A Yoruba mask can become an entry point into a discussion of ritual performance and community identity. A Maya stela can spark questions about political power, timekeeping, and the transmission of history. An Asmat ancestor pole can open a window onto collective memory, lineage, and mourning.
Museums sometimes worry that too much information will overwhelm or alienate visitors. But audiences are not fragile. They’re curious. They sense there are deeper stories behind the glass—and they want to hear them. Avoiding those stories for fear of discomfort flattens even the most extraordinary objects into inert décor.
What the Rockefeller Wing needs now is not just architectural brilliance but interpretive courage: a willingness to name the histories embedded in the collection, to explore the ways these objects were made, used, revered, and sometimes taken. The goal is not to diminish beauty, but to deepen public understanding—to make awe and understanding inseparable.
A truly decolonized museum doesn’t only build new galleries; it opens new ways of seeing. And at this moment, that’s the museum’s most urgent work.