Arts of Oceania

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave, 10028, New York City

July 1, 2026 – December 31, 2027

The Met’s Arts of Oceania galleries reopened in May 2025 in the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, presenting more than 650 works from over 140 cultures across Oceania, a region spanning nearly one-third of the earth’s surface. The galleries feature major artworks from New Guinea, the Pacific islands, Australia, and Island Southeast Asia, highlighting themes such as origins, initiation, ancestral power, and voyaging. Visitors encounter carved ancestral figures, ritual regalia, slit drums, crocodile reliquaries, turtle shell masks, canoes, and navigational objects that reflect both artistic mastery and cultural knowledge. Designed by WHY Architecture, Beyer, Blinder, Belle Architects LLP, and The Met’s Design Department, the new layout uses a diagonal route through the wing and bright, naturally lit galleries to emphasize island groupings, ancestral connections, and Indigenous ways of understanding time. New written and digital interpretation centers Indigenous voices and recent scholarship, while also showing that Oceanic art is living and continuing.