2024-04-19 02:20:02
The New York museum replaces West as the protagonist of its rooms with 4 thousand pieces from 200 cultures of the African continent.
He Metropolitan Art Museum (With the NYone of the largest art galleries in the world, wants to offer its millions of visitors, one less vision “western-centric” and put the focus on Africa and its 3 thousand years of cultural history.
It is also a way for the fourth largest museum in the world to attract more visitors. African Americans and to the African diaspora in the multicultural megalopolis of USArecognizes the general director of the MET, Max Hollein, In an interview.
The prestigious New York museum, located next to Central Park on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, since 1870, hopes to exhibit 4 thousand African works (out of a total of 1.5 million pieces) from more than 200 cultures of today’s sub-Saharan Africa, according to the managers.
After investing tens of millions of dollars in refurbishing the rooms, the MET will reopen its Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in the spring of 2025, which since 1982 has housed all the arts from Africa, Oceania and America prior to European colonization.
“We wanted a completely new architecture and scenography to display African art,” he boasts. Hollin, 54-year-old Austrian art historian and the first European to head the largest museum in USA.
By “offering a much broader perspective” and opening up to Africa More than 40 years ago, “the Rockefeller wing had already marked an important evolution for this museum” founded and financed by patrons and collectors of works from Europe, America, Asia, the Middle East and Greek and Roman antiquity, remember Hollein.
“We want make sure that we do not simply have a Western or Eurocentric perspective,” says the expert.
At the end of 2023, for example, it signed an agreement with museums of Nigeria to “facilitate the digitization and inventory” of their works.
With the help of interested countries, the MET In 2020, it also organized a great exhibition on the arts of empires sahelianos in the Middle Ages (Ghana, Mali, Songai and Segú) and another more modest one, which ended in March, on the ancient influence of
Byzantine Empire in the arts of Christians Egypt, Tunisia, Ethiopia y Sudan.
For Hollin, we must move away from a Western ethnocentric approach to works of art and “stop seeing these (African) objects simply because they influenced modern European art.”
And to “get involved” even more in Africa and situate the works in their local context, Hollein traveled at the end of March to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Tanzania to meet with museum curators, historians and contemporary artists.
The person responsible for MET had access to some exceptional archaeological sites: Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of a medieval city in the south of this southern African country, and the Tanzanian island of Kilwa Kisiwani, the remains of a medieval city declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO.
on the wing Rockefeller Videos will be shown with new descriptions of these sites. /
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2024-04-19 02:20:02