Māori art returns to NYC’s Met museum in reimagined exhibition

The Oceania galleries at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened on the weekend following an extensive renovation and reimagining from an Indigenous perspective.

The Arts of Oceania installation showcases more than 650 works representing 140 cultures from around Oceania including Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand.

The newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller wing at the Met continues the legacy of the landmark exhibition Te Māori: Māori Art from New Zealand Collections, which opened just over 40 years ago and set a benchmark for shared decision-making between museums and Indigenous communities.

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The reinstallation took eight years to plan and showcases artworks that were created in the last 500 years across the entire Oceania region, says Maia Nuku, a Met exhibition curator who spoke with RNZ’s Saturday Morning. Her goal was to show the region's expansive story of migration.

“...what I have worked hard to do is show the connectivity and the relationships and really help people understand the ocean is a highway.

“It is not something that separates us but it really links us.”

The exhibition's layout aims to demonstrate the connectivity and the ways peoples of Oceania see the world and the role art plays in navigating the physical and spiritual realms, Nuku says.

The Met has about 2,800 works from Oceania and only 25 percent of the collection is on display in the museum at this time, says Nuku. However, each artwork on display aims to create a throughline for Indigenous cultures around Oceania from Taiwan to Borneo to Papua New Guinea through to New Zealand’s Māori.

“Obviously, it is complex because Oceania with all its 10,000 islands and different landscapes and environments - it is like a kaleidoscope.”

Puamiria Parata-Goodall was a rangatahi (youth) performer for Te Māori when it toured the US from 1984 to 1986. Te Māori opened at the Met in September, 1984 before touring through several major American cities, bringing Māori art to a global audience. It was done with full Iwi authority, a shift in practice for museums that have a history of taking and showcasing Indigenous artifacts and artworks without consulting with the communities that created them.

Since 1984, the Met has maintained a strong relationship with Māori creatives, says Parata-Goodall, one of several Māori and Pasifika artists who attended the gallery's opening in New York City.

One thing that has changed in the last 40 years and in the Arts of Oceania is the fusing of heritage and art, which Western museums haven’t always acknowledged.

“For Māori, for our creators in particular, it is absolutely the same thing.”

An element of the reimagined exhibition that stood out to Parata-Goodall was contemporary work from artists such as Fiona Pardington installed alongside taonga (treasures) such as Māori carvings.

For Nuku, the reopening of the Met’s Oceania galleries provides a future, international platform for the region's contemporary artists.

“This is a foundation. This is the beginning.”