♪♪
-This is the largest art museum in the Americas...
Five floors high, four city blocks long.
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art
is 2.3 million square feet of treasure.
-The museum was largely an audacious vision.
-I just want to be surrounded by art and beauty.
♪♪
-In 2020, the Met turned 150.
The museum planned an anniversary year
nobody would forget.
-I'm this excited.
-Every year, we're pumping out something pretty amazing.
-But as the revels began, COVID struck New York.
-There are new warnings about the coronavirus outbreak.
-For the first time ever, the Met closed indefinitely.
-Walking through the museum with 5,000 years
of the greatest works of art, it's a spiritual experience.
-With the future unknown, was its survival in question?
-This is an exhibition install frozen in time.
This is a reminder that we can overcome.
♪♪
-Then the deaths of African-Americans
at the hands of white police officers shock America.
Demands for social justice for all
have the museum examining its past and its future.
-I could apologize all day long for J.P. Morgan
and everybody else.
What is meaningful is to put yourself on the line.
-The Met is an art museum,
and every artwork comes with a political message.
-Washington, you know, as an indigenous person,
he's not one of my heroes.
-Time to address what's on the walls,
what it's saying, to listen.
-These objects were stolen.
They were never intended to be in a space like The Met.
-In its 150th year comes an existential crisis.
The Met must change, or it will be history.
-It's an extraordinary political act of defiance.
-We're making new history now.
♪♪
-It's July 2020.
The Met has now been closed for four months by COVID-19.
♪♪
In May, the killing of George Floyd
has citizens of all races across America
marching in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
On July 22nd, New York police are clearing demonstrators
from City Hall Park
as curator Sheena Wagstaff visits the Met's Breuer Gallery.
She's taking down a landmark exhibition almost nobody saw.
♪♪
-I've actually never had the pleasure of doing that before,
being able to go right the way around it
and just see the room reflected in it.
It's extraordinary.
-Do you mind reiterating that one more time?
-No, I'm going to burst into tears in a second, actually.
I've never actually been in here
without people being in the space
because the show was only open for nine days, and, of course,
it was crowded after we opened.
What a pleasure.
What a tragedy.
[ Chuckles ]
Anyway...
-100 works by 88-year-old painter Gerhard Richter
explore a subject that suddenly seems timely...
racial intolerance and inhumanity.
-He was a teenager at the point of the Second World War,
and he had the maybe temerity or foolhardiness
to address directly the legacy of Nazism in Germany.
Richter dared to go where others feared to tread.
I think this show and one of the reasons
why I'm so...
sad about the fact that it's not reopening
is because the atrocities that are reflected in this exhibition
and the way that an artist has dealt with them,
having an unflinching gaze
on humankind's inhumanity to people
has so many lessons to teach us with the events
of this last four months through the coronavirus,
but, you know, more recently and more relevantly
in many respects, too,
the protests against the lack of cultural, racial,
and economic justice in our world.
It's a barometer, really, of our times,
I think, this exhibition,
and I'm just very sorry that people are not seeing it.
You know?
-The lockdown will end.
When that day comes, what will The Met's purpose be?
-There's one aspect of certainty.
Our institutions become local institutions.
We have never, except probably at the founding of the museum,
thought about the necessity to be relevant,
directly relevant to our local communities,
so this is actually a pretty amazing moment for us.
But we just have to get it right,
and we have to work damn hard to get it right.
♪♪
-A month later, The Met is open.
There are no tourists, so in its 150th anniversary year,
The Met is back where it started...
serving New Yorkers.
-People are looking for an outlet
because everything has been shut down.
Knowing that they can come here safely
is something that's really sat well with New Yorkers.
Oh, my God, she loves it here.
She makes it so much easier to not set anyone off.
They don't expect the golden retriever, you know,
to be a security-type animal.
[ Indistinct conversation ]
-It's a big day in the Samuel household in Connecticut.
Tracy-Ann is taking her daughters to the museum.
- Thank you. - You're welcome.
-She and husband Cleon grew up in New York.
The Met was their place.
-When we did live in New York, we went a lot.
-One of the best dates you ever took me on,
it was on Valentine's Day.
You took me to The Metropolitan Museum.
We had dinner at the restaurant.
That was a really lovely date.
We should do that again.
We have two daughters, Kristen and Kelsey.
They are 4 and 10. - Right.
-Kristen, she's the creative. She enjoys writing.
She's created a book group with her friends.
- ZAK. - ZAK, yeah.
Her best friends' first letters in their names
form the word "Zak."
They've been actively collaborating.
-At first, I thought it was a boy.
"I brought home..."
-The ZAK Book Club.
-The ZAK. [ Laughs ]
Kelsey is more of the adventurer.
-There's so much going on with race in America.
It is a struggle for our family,
and right now, the struggle is finding balance.
How much do we want to expose our girls to?
How much do we want them to be aware of?
So where we are, this area of Connecticut,
it's quite diverse.
However, we have to get comfortable
knowing that we may enter a room
and there may not be anyone else that looks like us.
But that's why it's very important
raising two young girls
that they're confident in the skin that they're in
and they're able to see themselves
reflected beautifully, whether it's in arts,
in magazines, the TV, whatever it is.
So we seek things out.
And we're off.
Okay.
You have to know what you're looking for,
but The Met does showcase power amongst people of color.
The African exhibit, the Egyptian art,
for my girls to see themselves reflected in history
in such a powerful way, it's important.
-Tracy-Ann is bound for a museum
changed by the events of the summer.
In June, an open letter identifying racism
at New York cultural institutions
demanded systemic change with immediate effect.
Many signatories were Met employees.
-One of the challenges for me, to be perfectly honest,
has been trying to come to terms with
and really understand the nature of the anger
and the frustration that have surfaced
in the light of this moment,
Black Lives Matter and indigenous people
and so many others who have been oppressed and that some of it
was directed at the leadership of this museum.
And I did not fully see that coming.
-In July, the executive team drew up the commitments,
promising changes from recruitment to acquisitions,
exhibitions to education.
-We designed a spreadsheet, and I said to everyone,
"If we don't fill this out and complete it,
then I should be replaced."
I look at this on a regular basis.
"Assessing our history.
A set of commitments to anti-racism cannot begin
without an honest assessment
of an institution's own history and present practices."
-The Met was born in an era when some collectors' tools
were a pickax and a sense of entitlement.
The treasure of other cultures was sometimes acquired
without respect or payment.
Some staff have expressed long-held anger.
-I sit in a seat that was occupied by many,
many predecessors going back to J.P. Morgan and others,
and people are mad at them and they're mad at the institution.
So our job is to try to figure out
how to deal with that,
and for me, that meant our commitments.
I could apologize all day long for my predecessors,
but that's an empty gesture.
What is meaningful is to put yourself on the line
to bring change that you think is needed.
-The Met has been deeply affected by a virus,
but will the demands for social justice
change the place forever?
-I think COVID and Black Lives Matter
will be ultimately commingled as an era,
but one of them is a disease we're trying to survive.
The other is a society we're trying to build.
And that should have more lasting importance.
-In the summer, controversial statues
all over the country were attacked.
Dan promises organizational changes,
but right now, the stories told by The Met's art
are under scrutiny.
How many works have the potential to offend?
19th-century sculpture "Hiawatha"
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens is a Met favorite
but perhaps not with Native American visitors.
-We have an obligation to explain
why these things are on view,
particularly when images or objects might have
a pejorative perspective on a culture or a people.
In this environment, we're doing more labeling
because we want people to learn,
and we think that's a useful thing for us to be doing.
That said, there is always the risk
that someone might want to deface a work of art
for any number of reasons.
I think it's important to recognize
that everybody's complicated.
Everybody's complicated.
George Washington is a good case in point.
There is no question that without George Washington,
this country would never have come into being.
That is a historical fact, and he believed in democracy.
He believed in what this country could be.
On the other hand, he owned slaves.
He thought himself a benevolent slave owner,
but the record says otherwise.
He was a product of the 18th century,
and he was a farmer and a slave owner.
And he thought that was his right.
So the question then is how do we reconcile
these aspects of this individual?
What should the historical record of him be?
What should The Metropolitan do about his legacy?
How should we display his art, and how should we describe it?
Reasonable people can disagree, and let them.
And through that kind of debate and discussion,
we'll all learn something.
♪♪
-The Met's commitments have gone public.
The press has published them.
Will visitors feel a difference?
Only time will tell.
-You want to touch the dog, you have to ask first.
-The Samuel family arrives,
and Kelsey deactivates The Met's security system.
-[ Laughs ]
That was adorable.
-The place might seem grand and imposing to the sisters,
but today, they're among the most important people here.
- Lead the way. - They are The Met's future.
-Mommy wants to show you something.
♪♪
-Tracy-Ann takes her young Americans
to see art that tells the national story.
Kristen reads between the lines.
Depictions of the general are better-known.
Emanuel Leutze's portrait of 1851,
"Washington Crossing the Delaware,"
is an American icon.
-Let's take a look at this picture together.
What's one big thing that you see?
-Mommy, there's ice and trees.
-Ice and trees. Good job.
-We're not sure if that's a woman,
so women are not represented in this picture, huh?
Now, Washington, he's a leader.
How is he different?
So he's armed.
Now, do you think Washington is a strong leader in this picture?
Well, I wouldn't say he's not doing anything.
Are you sure about that?
So he's a leader. - Yeah.
-But not in the sense of doing.
More in the sense of directing.
Do you think that leaders in these situations can be women?
-Yes.
-Do you see this person?
He doesn't even have a face.
He just has a little sliver over there.
You can see him.
♪♪
I rarely come into this section
because there really isn't much that I can relate to.
You know, you see so many pictures of...
men winning, and I would like to see more...
more representation of some women
or people of color winning so that I can show my girls,
"Hey, look, look!"
Or not even just to say, "Hey, look, look."
It's just something that they see.
-Downstairs in the Great Hall,
the iconic image of George Washington
has inspired a very different kind of history painting.
In 2018, The Met commissioned
two works from Native American artist Kent Monkman.
-When I was invited to do the project,
I thought of New York as this portal for immigration.
So, Europeans basically flooding
through New York into North America,
ultimately displacing the first people of this continent.
So I thought of arrivals and departures,
and the Great Hall itself
is a place of arrivals and departures.
-Monkman reinterprets classic paintings
to suggest alternative stories.
The Met invited him to explore their collections.
-The paintings or sculptures made by the settler artists
who were looking at indigenous people
are always this romantic view of the vanishing race.
In fact, we're very much alive.
My work really is refuting those themes of disappearance.
-The paintings feature Miss Chief Eagle Testickle,
a gender-fluid persona
the artist inhabits for public events.
-Looking at the Emanuel Leutze painting,
he's the hero of that painting,
and I wanted Miss Chief to be the hero of my two paintings.
I wanted to make a monumental painting
that really reflected on indigenous perspective
to give it that same importance.
-Monkman is from the Cree First Nation.
He works here in Toronto, Canada.
Projects are frequently a celebration
of non-binary sexuality
that's part of Native American culture.
-We had people who lived in the opposite gender,
people who were that full spectrum of LGBTQ,
and they were misunderstood by the Europeans who arrived.
And they thought they were disgusting.
This is a rather gruesome image
based on a 15th Century engraving by Theodor de Bry,
which shows the Spanish conquistadors
throwing sodomites to the dogs.
I'm not shy of making work that has political impact.
I have things that I want to say
that speak about the experience of indigenous people,
both historical and in the present,
and those are political experiences
because we've been colonized and we continue to be colonized.
-Monkman's political message is delivered
with mischievous humor.
-So a lot of my paintings, Miss Chief is sort of central.
She's the witness who is there
while these things are happening.
Like, Miss Chief is there when the newcomers arrive.
She's also there when her people are displaced.
There's a lot of humor in Cree culture and in our stories,
but also, you know, as a strategy
for just seducing people into my work.
I use humor as a way to kind of disarm people
because I look at a lot of dark things,
and, of course, "Washington Crossing the Delaware"
is this monumental celebration of an American hero.
And Washington was a slave owner,
and he was burning down indigenous villages.
So, you know, as an indigenous person,
he's not one of my heroes.
-The museum's two paintings
are entitled "mistikôsiwak," or "Wooden Boat People."
-The Met, in commissioning these works,
they are saying, "We want to engage with diverse voices.
We want to engage with indigenous voices,"
and it was an opportunity to reflect
on that colonial mind set
that created these narratives in museums like The Met.
-Wow.
-In the Great Hall, the Samuels find
the epic painting speaks directly to them.
-Over here, you see people from different walks of life.
I mean, that guy looks like Daddy.
The guy in the white coat.
Doesn't he kind of look like Daddy?
-Yeah.
-He looks like he's a doctor
because he's wearing a necklace that has...
-Oh, okay.
This is interesting.
What did you notice?
And look what's on his hands.
-Yeah.
- Kristen. - Yes?
-Good job.
Before the museum shut down,
we came here, we saw these paintings.
It caught my eye because it's very modern,
but you never really stop to look at them
because this has always been such a busy hub.
-Leading The Met's diversity drive,
Max Hollein splashed the boat people right at the front door.
-Placement is, of course, part of this.
They are not somewhere in gallery 117 to the left
and then to the right and then to the middle.
They have to be strong positions.
This one had a huge opportunity, but it's a challenge.
It's a challenge for the artist,
so you push artists to really respond to that.
And we respond to it well,
and I think that's the case certainly for Kent.
And then others who might feel uncomfortable
with that level of permanent exposure,
but it's also a very charged environment.
It's not just a white wall, so you have to make sure
that the work can really stand its ground.
-Art and politics are inseparable.
Conservator Dorothy Mahan works on a portrait painted
in Revolutionary times.
-I'm cleaning this picture, finally.
It was in the collection for 40 years
and never been in conservation.
The painting was painted in 1788.
They were a power couple.
Even having a portrait made in this size was a statement.
-Jacques-Louis David's painting shows scientists
Mr. and Mrs. Lavoisier to be all work and no play.
-That's not the way the portrait began.
The first conception of the picture
was a well-to-do couple in stylish 18th century mode.
They started out in much more fancy dress.
She had a gigantic high-style hat.
Originally, he was sitting at a very fancy
French 18th-century desk,
but David was an incredibly good painter.
The final finish
doesn't really display any of those tremendous changes.
-Then came the French Revolution.
X-rays reveal a portrait flaunting wealth
that became dangerous overnight.
-All the years that this picture was looked at and studied,
no one ever suspected until it came up to the studio,
where we really got a close look at it,
that all these changes were made.
-This is a map that shows the distribution of that.
The red paint that you see there is actually red.
-Red and black in the 1780s is incredibly fashionable,
from Marie Antoinette right on down,
and what's great
is the specificity of that particular hat,
which can actually be pinpointed within a few months of being
at the height of fashion, really specific in its moment.
Not really the timeless image
that we think of with the end result.
-You see the table was fully painted.
You see that the leg was shifted.
We really had so many discoveries.
-You go from a really kind of high-fashion, mundane image
to one that's science, reason.
We don't know what point these changes happened.
We know that the royal authorities were advising
Lavoisier and David not to show this portrait.
Presumably, there's a discussion that happens quite late on
where they decide,
"No, let's rethink the entire thing."
-You know, we can understand the history,
but when you actually see that process,
it does really give us a closer glimpse at the time.
-Well, and Mr. Lavoisier is beheaded
shortly after this is painted, but this shows you how quickly
the political terrain is evolving
and people uncertain how to even address it.
Are we good?
It's really so beautiful.
♪♪
-Okay, we got to go off just like that.
-Yeah, just keep it close to the wall, alright.
Ready? One, two, three.
[ Whirring ]
-In the European Paintings gallery,
226 years after Antoine Lavoisier lost his head,
he and his wife are being hung.
-Great, thank you.
Yeah, it's crooked, but at least it's hanging.
Yeah. - Right side needs to come down
about three inches, but that's...
-The French costume drama is interesting...
-The right side.
-...but The Met's full of
the stories of the rich, white, and dead.
What art is selected for display and where,
whose stories are told,
even the framing are all political decisions,
prompting debate among the curators.
-More, quite a bit.
-Department head Keith Christiansen is retiring
after 44 years at The Met.
-I'm leaving at the right stage.
There needs to be a younger generation
who now moves in more keenly aware of
the museum's shifting relationship with society.
I don't think I would be the right person to do that.
-Good. Thank you all.
-I hope that as the present and the past
become further and further detached,
it's always the primary mission of the museum
to try and preserve
the particular voice of the individual works of art
rather than to make them speak what we want them to say.
♪♪
-Sheena Wagstaff is a modernist.
She'd like The Met experience to say something new.
-So you come into the Great Hall,
and you are confronted immediately
with this beautiful Athena on the left,
which heralds the beginning of the Greek and Roman galleries,
and then on the right,
a pharaoh that heralds the Egyptian galleries.
And then right at the top of the stairs,
you can see this huge Tiepolo,
which is European civilization that sits at the top.
What would it be if one changed that idea?
There are other stories to tell.
The Met is already on its way to tell those stories,
but we could be a little bit more radical, perhaps.
-Her modern and contemporary galleries
are full of alternative narratives.
African-American artists have a voice.
Kerry James Marshall's celebration of the visit
to the studio of his hero, Charles White.
Sam Gilliam's drape painting
commenting on the state of things in 1968.
An homage to hardscrabble Harlem by Faith Ringgold.
Sheena's just bought another.
-This is a piece by Rashid Johnson,
and it's called "Five Broken Men,"
representing a more generalized version of what it means
to be a Black man in a society that is still inherently racist.
These are not "political paintings," per se,
but they have a political undercurrent.
There is, I think, a new state of urgency that museums
particularly need to respond to,
The Met being one of the biggest ones.
A response to the political urgencies of this time.
-The museum is committed to increasing the diversity
of art and artists, but that will be a slow process.
-What I'm trying to get is that opening shot,
finding the performer.
Framing the performer.
-It can be much more nimble through its program
of live arts events.
-Let's try this way.
-Lee Mingwei is a Taiwanese-American artist
whose medium is performance.
He's brought his touring work, "Our Labyrinth," to the Met,
and a collaboration
with celebrated dance master Bill T. Jones.
-The idea arrived when I was visiting
some of the sacred sites and temple in Myanmar.
I saw all those people cleaning the path
to the temple 24 hours a day.
It's a gift for the temple.
It's a gift for the people who visit a temple.
So the next day, I went and just did the cleaning,
and the idea came to me
that I would love to do this in a museum
because museum for me is a spirit house.
-Okay, so what I'm suggesting is glide along the wall
and find her.
Mingwei is quite a masterful artist,
and he has done a version of this in many, many locations.
And I was asking, "What makes it different in New York City?"
My inflection has demanded
that the people in it are as diverse as possible.
-I realize it's all about
what is it to be a Black,
be a Asian, be a Latino, be a white
living in a cosmopolitan city such as New York?
-The work is a meditation on kindness.
-We're at this moment of Black Life Matters,
and I, with Bill, bring this work
to a relatively Victorian idea
of what a museum could be.
-I have my fights with the 19th century.
Oh, God. I don't know.
I don't see any Confederate monuments here.
But I can imagine the politics of some of the people
who made some of these things here.
Not my concern.
History. We're making new history now.
-The dance is filmed for broadcast
on the Met's own digital channel.
-Culture is almost like a giant ocean liner.
You don't turn on a dime.
We find a time where the museum had to retreat,
and now it's trying to come back
and wants to come back with what face?
♪♪
-For much of the Met's 150 years,
the American Wing galleries have displayed homegrown art,
telling familiar stories to a largely white audience.
-It was a very limited and biased account
of what constituted American art.
We're very cognizant of what
has been left out of that story...
certainly women artists, artists of color,
Native American artists and Latin American artists.
For the longest time, this gallery
had the largest number of works
representing African-American figures,
but no works by African-American artists,
so that was something, when I arrived,
I really wanted to address head-on.
This work by an enslaved artisan
named David Drake from South Carolina
dates to the 1850s.
He was also signing them and penning verse to go on them.
This is at a time that it was against the law
for enslaved individuals
to actually be literate in South Carolina.
It's an extraordinary political act of defiance.
The moment we're in right now is so deeply embedded in the past.
America was founded, you know, on genocide and enslavement.
That is something we can't forget
because it explains so much about where we are today,
particularly now and the issues we're dealing with,
with racial justice, income inequality.
It all has its roots in our histories.
The Ames vase here. The Indian vase.
It is an extraordinary feat of carving,
no question is a work of art in and of itself,
but it's deeply problematic.
Now we started a new project
called the Native Perspectives approach,
and we're actually inviting Native scholars,
Native artists to respond
to these rather problematic depictions.
Bringing in that additional perspective
has been really revealing, I think, for our visitors.
We're not doing our job well if we're not telling those stories.
-In 2017,
the American Wing expanded its Native American collection.
A bequest of 91 items of indigenous art
came with a condition...
they must be displayed with other American arts.
Today, Sylvia Yount gets a guided tour
from a new and exceptional colleague.
Patricia Norby is the first
Native American curator in Met history.
-What I find most striking about this
is the very fine craftsmanship...
- Oh, extraordinary. - Of this moose antler.
This was significant to the person who was using it.
-And so not as a ceremonial object.
-Well, our ceremonial items are actually used.
-Right.
-They still embody great meaning.
Native and indigenous peoples are incredibly diverse.
But environmental issues, systematic racism, violence...
these are issues that Native and indigenous people
have been dealing with for a very long time.
For indigenous people, these problems never ended.
You know, each of us have our own origin stories,
our own histories,
our own relationships to our homelands,
and so our art reflects all of these important elements.
Each have their own experiences with museums.
There's no one set way to work with each community
other than to be respectful of their ways.
♪♪
-No running, no running, no running.
-Kristen and Kelsey have reached the Egyptian galleries.
They're finding kinship in deep antiquity.
-We were talking about the figures
and how they were painted and how they look like us...
the colors used for their skins, the reddish browns,
the raven black hair.
It's such a predominant representation
of strength, beauty, power.
It's just fascinating to me.
I was born in Jamaica, West Indies,
and I came to America when I was 8 years old.
My parents gave up everything...
-Mm-hmm.
-...for better opportunity.
[Voice breaking] And...
Sorry.
I started to find out what my ancestry was.
[ Breathes deeply ]
And I realized that...
I'm sorry.
It was hard to do
because our ancestry is nonexistent.
This genealogist that was trying to help me
shared references, websites
in which you can track your ancestors
who came to the islands through the ships.
And all you see is just, like,
"Negro, Negro, Negro, Negro, Negro, Negro."
No names.
There's no way to track.
So this is where I come.
I know that I have African history
and what has been taught to myself and my children
has been that of slavery.
And there's more. There is more.
Before that. What was it?
♪♪
-Gallery 131 offers one answer.
-[ Gasps ] What do you see?
-The Temple of Dendur was built by Romans
in awe of North African gods and architectural splendor.
-We come from such rich heritage,
but the only images being shared in school systems...
All slavery, the civil-rights movements.
And I get it... those are all important pieces of history.
But there is more.
There's engineering, there's mathematics,
there's science where we've been trailblazers.
And I, in my late 30s,
I'm just now learning about this.
I wanted to give my girls a head start
to learn about these things,
to realize that we are so much more
than the negative images on the screens.
We're descendants of kings and queens.
♪♪
-The Met wants this affirmative experience for all
and has around 2 million objects to tell their stories with.
The museum lends and also borrows
on an international scale.
The Sahel exhibition celebrates five ancient Saharan empires
that for over 1,300 years produced great art.
Many of the 200 exhibits are loaned by African museums.
[ Buzzer sounds ]
Today it's being taken down.
The smaller objects are gone.
Time to send the massive portal stone
back to the Met's partner museum in Senegal.
-Morning, guys.
-The head of the Met's in-house heavy lifting team
is Crayton Sohan. - [ Chuckles ]
-Nothing big moves in the museum without his nod.
-So, we're going to put the strap right here.
It's two and a half tons. It's pretty heavy.
With this kind of work, there's no trial and error
because everything we touch,
it's millions and millions of dollars.
-Conservator Carolyn Riccardelli
regularly sends large parcels across the globe.
Crayton wraps them all.
-I've built up a tolerance, so I don't get nervous,
but it's hard for a lot of people to watch.
-This bottom, we pull this way, so we tip it over.
In the air. And we get them flat.
♪♪
All now together. We got to be even.
You grow up with the saying that everybody has a talent.
Hold it.
We got to straighten it up a little bit
and move them down this way.
There you go.
I got into this department,
and things started to come naturally.
That's good.
It turns out that this apparently was my talent.
♪♪
I got the opportunity here.
I loved it here. I work with some great people.
I guess people saw what I can do,
and I got the breaks, I took it,
and I got encouragement along the way.
And here I am 36 years-plus later.
[ Chuckles ]
Where you came from or your color or your religion
has nothing to do with what you can do.
You have it or you don't with this kind of work.
-The Met began during America's Industrial Revolution.
European arts were afforded respect.
The rest was of little interest.
For decades, objects from Black and brown cultures
were ethnography, not art.
♪♪
-These are all exquisite.
-Growing up, Mary Rockefeller
heard them called "primitive."
-That was the prevailing word then
mainly because people didn't respect
and understand this indigenous art.
-In the 1960s, her father, Nelson Rockefeller,
a collector of this overlooked art,
offered the Met his entire collection.
-The museum was not interested,
and they encouraged Father to give his collection
to the Museum of Natural History.
And, of course, he wasn't interested
in the Museum of Natural History at all.
He was interested in the recognition
of the excellence of this art.
-In 1980, Rockefeller finally won.
The new wing for
the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
was dedicated to Mary's twin, Michael.
As a boy, he'd been obsessed.
-Michael and Father developed
this incredible bond over this art,
and Michael wanted to get out of his environment
of how he'd been brought up.
They decided that New Guinea was the place for him to go
because they wanted to collect art from the Asmat peoples.
-In 1961, Michael Rockefeller disappeared.
Some said he'd drowned,
others that he'd been eaten by cannibals.
-I went to look for my brother.
It was a sad, terrible experience for me,
but I was lucky enough to go to New Guinea,
and it made me understand
some of what Michael must have experienced,
why he was so drawn.
And that art deals with the kind of issues
that anybody in the world are dealing with...
issues of safety, power, life and death.
They were right out front with those things.
There's all kinds of motifs that have enormous meaning.
They're all metaphors.
See all these motifs here?
Some of them are the praying mantis.
The female bites off the head of the male,
and, of course, it's all related to the ceremony of headhunting.
You can go into all the horrible places about it all...
or you can step back and try to see it
in a larger context of what they were doing.
And when you look at the culture of the Asmat
and you look at the amount of people
that were killed in that culture,
it is so minuscule compared to our culture.
I hardly ever get to talk about this stuff.
I mean, I just remember having these discussions with...
You know, and... And trying to... to see it
from Michael's perspective
and why he was so excited about these people
and why he loved that area so much.
-The Rockefeller collection was born out of Michael's devotion
but still poses the big question...
shouldn't it all be given back?
-I think that a lot has to do with respect.
I mean, if objects are stolen
or that it's clear objects were taken from a country...
not sold but taken...
they should get returned.
I think it's very difficult to go back in history.
Sometimes it's not clear. But it's a challenging question.
I don't feel I have all the answers.
♪♪
-It's being addressed by
Puerto Rican artist Miguel Luciano.
He is a frequent visitor to a Rockefeller collection
of pre-Columbian Caribbean arts.
This sculpture has particular resonance
used in community ritual.
Luciano is part of a new Met project
using art to build links between the museum
and its neighboring communities.
-It's a really special object.
It was probably used in ceremonies,
using this kind of hallucinogenic plant medicine.
It's similar, I think, to ayahuasca.
It's probably from Haiti or the Dominican Republic,
the island of Hispaniola.
If it weren't for the museum,
I would never have access to this thing.
I'm grateful that it's here, but I'm also very conflicted
by my experience of my own history and heritage
that's limited by the museum
and its kind of institutional framework
that has always been a very colonial framework.
And the acquisition history of so many of the objects
that we find in museums in general
share these kinds of colonial legacies.
But it's not so simple
as just returning them to where they came from perhaps.
Obviously, the objects, they're protected for preservation,
but it prevents us from understanding them
perhaps the way they were originally intended
for us to understand them.
And so how do we reimagine them
in the spaces of our own community
as opposed to this very sort of, like, depersonalized,
sterile form of engagement?
-The fragile figure wouldn't survive being handled.
So Miguel has cloned it.
-This nice candy kind of gloss is what I'm looking for.
-Working with the Met's digital imaging team,
Luciano has modeled the figure using a 3-D printer.
Today, he's come to a Manhattan plastics company to work on it.
-This object is a Taíno zemí cohoba stand.
The top of this would have been used
as a pedestal to grind cohoba from.
It would have been used to have visions, right,
by the community leader, like a shaman.
The imagery of the figure has such an intensity.
The ribs on the back show you
that this character was kind of emaciated,
probably fasting before the ceremony.
But this is what I love about it...
Is that his eyes, you see those grooves.
And so these were tears carved in.
His teeth are gritting.
So that kind of intensity of crying
and gritting and grimacing... - Yeah.
-...uh, it might have been part
of the physical experience of taking cohoba.
- Hm. - And so these may have been
used in ceremonies throughout the Caribbean, so, you know...
-There's still, like, hieroglyphics on, like, rocks.
You pass by it all the time.
-This is what is exciting to me about this object.
The whole purpose of making this is so that people
who actually share in the history and heritage
of this object
can understand it in an up-close and personal way.
[ Tool whirring ]
These are ancestral objects
that have been taken away from us,
from their ancestral lands.
Ultimately, these were stolen.
They were never intended to be in a space like the Met.
It is time for museums to maybe reconsidering
their own colonial past
as they think about how to be more relevant
in the present and in the future.
-Miguel's neighborhood, El Barrio,
was once called Spanish Harlem.
Public art is on every corner.
He's turning the Met's ancient carving
back into art for the public
and, at his studio, unveiling it for his mentor,
Hiram Maristany.
-I'm a little older than Miguel. I'm a little older.
- Couple years. Couple years. - Six months older than Miguel.
-[ Laughs ] Six months.
[ Indistinct chanting ]
-In 1968, the community formed
the Young Lords civil-rights protest movement.
Hiram was their photographer.
His pictures still adorn the area.
In 1973, they featured in a Met show...
The Art and Heritage of Puerto Rico.
-To this day, it's the largest survey of Puerto Rican art
that's existed in any major museum.
-I think it would be fair and just to give credit
to some of the people at the Met.
They took risk.
It was a mind shift. - Absolutely.
I was one year old when the show happens, right?
So, I was born in '72. - I was three years old.
- [ Laughs ] Yeah, right. Right. - [ Laughs ]
-But I'm saying, like, the generation in front of me,
right, it's an incredibly influential show
for an entire generation.
So, this is what I'm doing with the Met right now.
We actually went to see Arte del mar
a couple weeks ago.
The premier object in the show is the zemí cohoba stand.
This is a replica.
The zemí in blue.
- Amazing, man. - It still needs a lot
of polishing and stuff. - Mm-hmm.
-The idea is to actually create a venue in El Barrio
so we can actually introduce this to the community
in a way where people can have uninterrupted access to it.
- It's a great piece, man. - Thanks.
- I love it. I really love it. - I mean, it's in process, so...
-Yeah. No, no. This is a prime example
of what a really good art project should be,
you know, at the end of the day.
We come from a colonized reality,
and a lot of our history was denied us.
-Mm-hmm.
-And in that denial, we lost the ability to appreciate
some of the indigenous elements of our culture.
-What you just described... Access to our own history...
is really what drives this whole project.
These were ceremonial objects. These were...
- They're religious objects. - They were... Exactly.
I've been thinking a lot about these ancestral connections.
You know, even if we're reimagining them
through this kind of, you know, this blue resin artifice,
it's like... it's embedded in there somewhere, you know?
-Miguel's Met project will now expand
into the community.
Regenerated, the 1,000-year-old figure
will again, he hopes, promote unity and identity.
The largest art museum in the Americas
has a responsibility to empower by making visible
the stories of every citizen
of a country defined by immigration.
The Met is led by a white man
who grew up seeing the trauma of the Civil Rights Movement.
Witnessing racial injustice again,
he's promising change.
-These issues affected
the daily lives of so many people
that I consider friends and colleagues
that I didn't know anything about.
And that's, I think, ultimately what privilege is...
the ability, the luxury to say one thing,
believe that you believe it, but not really know.
And we know that we have failed in many ways.
We have not always been an institution
that is welcoming to everyone, public or staff.
What we can do is make sure that this museum
is really here for everybody.
♪♪
-How many eyes do you see?
-Tracy-Ann and her girls
are coming to the end of their visit.
-A god with a wet nose?
I'm hoping that by seeing more images
that are reflective of diversity,
my girls can find a place for themselves
within those images
and find beauty and find success.
♪♪
It's interesting to see how historical figures
were portrayed.
There's a message that they're sending...
a message of authority, power.
You look at an image, but you don't have
a full understanding of the backstory
or the conflict that surrounds that particular image.
-One has dominated their day.
-It's really important if we're going to present images
of George Washington
that we don't just take them at face value.
I mean, this is one of the most heroicized depictions
in the history of all art.
So to draw attention to that fact,
currently on view there are wonderful responses
to this picture.
-Jacob Lawrence. "The American Struggle."
-There's a great painting by Jacob Lawrence, actually,
the leading African-American artist of the 20th century.
In Lawrence's telling, Washington is absent.
He's eschewed the "great man" narrative entirely
to focus on the anonymous soldiers
who obviously were responsible
for the success of this endeavor.
-This exhibition is a highlight
of Director Max Hollein's diversity drive.
In 1954, Lawrence began this series of paintings
chronicling America's birth pangs
and honoring the contribution of the Black population.
His Washington Crossing the Delaware
attracts Kristen's attention.
-There's some obvious differences here, Kristen.
What do you think about this piece?
Is there a leader here?
-When the museum reopened,
this exhibition became the talk of the town.
-Oh, look at these, Kristen.
- Hm. - Wow.
"In this harrowing scene,
blood-red streaks punctuating a vertical mass
of chained and armed Black and white figures
convey in visceral terms
the powerful desire to live free."
-It's not a large exhibition with regard to, like, checklist,
but it's immense
from a symbolic, institutional standpoint.
This exhibition has been planned for years,
but it accrued timeliness
in the wake of George Floyd's murder,
and then I think it accrued additional meaning
as we've all endured our own struggles
under COVID and social distancing.
So there's a great sense of a kind of communal experience
in this space, I think.
Jacob Lawrence's narrative
has to do with the necessity of struggle
to achieve and maintain a democracy.
I think that those themes also are resonating
as the U.S. approaches the election.
Jacob Lawrence, he's arguably the most important
Black American artist of the 20th century.
But regardless of his race,
just... he's fundamentally one of the greats.
-This is my first time
going to an exhibit in which a African-American
is celebrated on such a large scale.
Though the theme itself... [Chuckling]
may not be the most beautiful,
in the end, there's triumph.
There is this thirst for freedom at any cost.
♪♪
And that should be celebrated.
I can't wait to see
what the next 50 years will look like.
Even if I need a wheelchair, she'll take me to the Met
because she knows just how important this place is to me.
♪♪
-The Met has now safely reopened to visitors' delight.
-It means there is some semblance of normalcy.
-Looking at beautiful things, just... I need it.
-But the crisis isn't over yet.
-It's not like it was before.
-We're likely to see somewhere between
$100 and $150 million of loss.
-Each of the collecting departments
has gone to their donors, their supporters.
-There are a lot of tough choices.
-"Love and Money," next time on "Inside the Met."
♪♪
-To order "Inside the Met" on DVD,
visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.
♪♪