The intricately painted panels of crocodiles, flying foxes and cassowary bellies hovering above the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will have a different look when the gallery reopens this weekend, after a four-year-plus renovation.
The piece, called Ceremonial House Ceiling, was reconfigured through a collaboration with the Kwoma people of Papua New Guinea, some 9,000 miles away. This is probably the first time Pacific artists had input into its reinstallation since it was first displayed at the museum in 1982, when the wing opened.
The number of panels, called pangal, which are individually painted sago palm petioles, has also dwindled to 170 from over 270. Pangal created by the Kalaba clan are now positioned south of the central spine that divides the structure. The other half were made by the Wanyi and are closer to the north.
The pangal, through their designs, are a map of the cosmos, mythical knowledge and clan histories. They are hung in the men’s ceremonial house, the largest and most sacred building in a Kwoma village. It is where initiation rites of young men, ceremonies tied to yam cultivation and other important events, are held.
Museum staff jumped at the chance to collaborate with the Kwoma people, who were deeply involved in the project and came to New York for the gallery’s reopening.
“It’s really allowed us to talk about relationships and our community partnerships in a way that has been very instructive for the visiting public,” said Maia Nuku, the Met’s curator of Oceanic art. She spoke as drills buzzed and heavy machinery beeped earlier this month when workers scurried to put the finishing touches on the wing.
Douglas Newton, then the curator of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, established by Nelson A. Rockefeller on West 54th Street in Manhattan, commissioned the ceiling in 1970, after the Met announced that it would inherit Rockefeller’s collection of non-Western art and install it as a new department and wing. Newton later became the Met’s first chair of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The wing was named after Rockefeller’s son Michael, who collected 20 percent of the objects now on display in the Oceania section.
Back then, the art world was focused on abstract paintings and works by European and American artists, Nuku said, adding that Newton and others focused instead on placing art from Oceania in the spotlight.
The commission took place just ahead of Papua New Guinea gaining independence from Australia in 1975. Around this time, discussions were being held about modernity and how might art and architecture be part of the formation of a national identity. “Prior to that, of course, this kind of art has always been seen as unfamiliar,” Nuku said.
Twenty-seven named Kwoma artists, mostly from the Kalaba and Wanyi clans of the Mariwai village, painted the individual pangal, the base where the leaf of the sago palm attaches to the trunk of the tree. Once it is flattened and cured, one side of the panel is then covered with a wash of black clay. A senior artist would outline a motif in clear water before it is retraced in colorful paints. The long finials that jut out on the ends of the ceiling are made of wood.
“Creating a ceremonial house in a village is really a way to express your status,” Nuku said. “You want your clan to have the kind of prime site and the space in the ceiling, which is more prominent, where people can see your clan design.”
Sylvia Cockburn, a senior research associate at the Met, said that the motifs and meanings of the pangal are fluid and can mean different things according to who painted it, what clan they belong to, and what story they are attaching to it.
“You can start to put all of these together and understand how it’s explaining the environment and the world around the village,” Cockburn said.
The pangal also carry special meaning understood only by the Kwoma culture.
“We have an insight into what some of the motifs mean but we’re not really supposed to consume it all and understand it all,” Nuku said. “They’re keeping some of that back for themselves.”
Over the years, the museum changed its display of the ceiling. Its first iteration in 1982 hung so low, it delivered a feeling of claustrophobia, Nuku said. It was raised higher in 2007.
The process of getting the piece hung in its third and newest formation began when Shiva Lynn Burgos, an artist, curator and special envoy for Papua New Guinea on art, visited the Rockefeller Wing in 2014 and recognized the pangal as likely creations of the Sepik River peoples, potentially the Kwoma.
Concerned that the village may not have been aware of how the ceiling was revered in New York, she returned to the Mariwai late that year to show images of the piece at the Met and read aloud a list of named artists. Two were still alive, she learned: Chief Paul Yapmunggwiyo Kongi and Kurumbai.
“They were very shocked,” Burgos said in a recent phone interview from Papua New Guinea. In particular, they worried that their secrets were being divulged to museum visitors. “There was a lot of confusion, worry, surprise.”
Burgos, who also founded the Mariwai Project, an organization that helps the traditional people of Papua New Guinea keep their culture alive, said the significance of the pangal had been carefully explained to her over time. The secrets were so sacred they could not be uttered aloud inside the village. Burgos said she learned “the different layers of spirit, ownership, value” and why the group believed it was important that it be balanced in a way that respected the custom.
Kurumbai died in 2014, two years before a new ceremonial house, Tokimba, was inaugurated. That house, which is for initiated men but will allow others on certain occasions, now stands as a living partner to the piece in New York.
In 2018, when Burgos learned that the Rockefeller Wing would undergo a major renovation, she thought it was the right opportunity to create an artistic intervention.
The next year, the Mariwai Project worked with descendants of the artists and Chief Kongi to create a mock-up of the ceiling based on clan affiliation and status of the artists involved. Then in 2023, the Met converted that into a three-dimensional model. The installation now measures 53 feet 2 inches tip to tip. The pangal, now one-third fewer, were reinstalled in the renovated gallery over three weeks in August 2024. Chief Kongi died several months earlier.
Translating the significance of the redesign in the context of the museum to the Kwoma has been challenging. “It’s really an abstract concept,” Burgos said. “It’s like you imagining what it’s like to be in the village, in this remote place. It’s hard to put it into a realistic framework. So it’s theoretical, but that also makes it magical.”
The moment is not lost on Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea. In a statement to The New York Times, he said that as the country prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence, it was imperative to showcase its rich cultural heritage and artistic talents. “Our art is a vibrant representation of our history, diversity, and identity, and it deserves recognition on a global stage,” he said.
Burgos and the prime minister have been working for weeks to bring a small delegation to New York. It includes Chief Mathew Kuarchinj and Tobi Borungai, the chairman of the Mariwai Culture Group. Both are descendants of artists who worked on the piece in the 1970s. The group will participate in an Oceanic art sunrise ceremony on Thursday, May 29, before the wing is reopened.
Chief Kuarchinj said that he was a small boy and too young to remember his elders painting the ceiling that hangs in New York. “Our fathers told us about Douglas,” he said through Burgos, who translated Tok Pisin, an official national language of Papua New Guinea. “We now carry our ancestors to New York to meet the spirits in the ceiling.”
The chief and Borungai arrived in New York on Monday, amid an uncertain time for international tourists considering travel to the United States. Some have been detained at U.S. borders. Others are canceling or rethinking travel to the country altogether.
Burgos was not worried, but she acknowledged it might be tricky for the men to bring in their traditional costumes, feathers and bones.
Despite the challenges, she has remained steadfast in her determination to represent the village. “I feel like the ancestors are present and they work through things,” she said. “They certainly work through me.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts.
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