Original subtitles

Nestled in New York's Central Park,

this is the largest art museum in America.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is 2.3 million square feet

of objects spanning 5,000 years of history.

The museum really was an audacious vision -

to create a cultural centre that rivalled the greatest in the world.

The Met is a collection of collections -

paintings, jewellery, textiles, statuary.

And the world's most famous fashion gala.

Every year we're pumping out something pretty amazing.

It's America's treasure house.

The collection is what excites every curator to be part of this

institution.

In 2020, the Met turned 150.

In its pomp, and ready to celebrate.

I'm this excited!

But as the revels began, Covid-19 struck New York.

There are new warnings about the coronavirus outbreak.

For the first time ever, the Met was shut - indefinitely.

Then, the deaths of African Americans at the hands

of white police officers shook America.

Demands for social justice for all have the museum

examining its past and its future.

I could apologise all day long for JP Morgan and everybody else.

What is meaningful is to put yourself on the line.

The Met is an art museum,

and every work of art carries 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 -

with humility.

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 five 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.

As head of the Modern and Contemporary Art department,

she's taking down a landmark exhibition almost nobody saw.

I've actually never had the pleasure of doing that before.

Of 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.

Erm, I've never actually been in here without people

being in the space.

Cos the show was only open for nine days

and, of course, it was crowded after we opened.

What a pleasure. What a tragedy.

Anyway.

100 works by 88-year-old painter Gerhard Richter

explore a subject that suddenly seems timely -

racial intolerance and inhumanity.

This painting is emblematic of Richter's early work.

He is playing around with the notion of photorealism,

and the idea of reality.

He is also inclining, some years later, into pure abstraction.

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.

These paintings are based on four photographs taken by prisoners

in the concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau,

and their job was to take the bodies out of the ovens

and dispose of them.

These photographs stimulated Richter to try to take account of this

event, this historic event, by painting it.

Richter dared to go where others feared to tread.

I think this show, and one of the reasons why I'm so...

..erm, 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.

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.

Any discussion about the future of the museum

really has to take account of this moment,

across not just the curatorial departments, but also in the

communications department, in, you know, the Director's office itself.

And not just things like recruitment, but a much more

forensic investigation in how we conduct our daily business.

I mean, it's huge.

A month later, and the Met is open.

Safety is everything.

Visitor numbers are restricted.

There are no tourists,

so the museum's back where it was in 1870, serving locals.

People are looking for an outlet

because everything has been shut down.

But 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.

Jaguar...

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 a dinner at the restaurant.

Mm-hm. That was a really lovely date.

We should do that again.

We have two daughters, Kristen and Kelsey.

They are four and ten.

Correct. Kristen, she's the creative.

She enjoys writing. Yes.

She's created a book group with her friends.

ZAK. ZAK, yeah.

Her best friends,

the first letters in their names form the word ZAK.

They've been actively collaborating, if you will.

At first I thought it was a boy, so my eyebrow kind of...

The ZAK book club.

Who's Zak? Kelsey is more of the adventurer.

There is 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?

This area of Connecticut, it... 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 are in

and they're able to see themselves reflected

beautifully, whether it's in art,

in magazines, the TV,

whatever it is.

So we seek things out.

And we're off!

OK.

You have to

know what you're looking for,

but the Met does showcase power

amongst people of colour - 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, a letter identifying racism at all New York arts institutions

demanded immediate change.

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 captioning,

exhibitions to education - even the art.

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 pick axe and a sense of entitlement.

The treasure of other cultures was sometimes acquired without respect,

or payment.

Staff have expressed long-held anger.

I sit in a seat that was occupied by many,

many predecessors going back to JP 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, how to deal with that.

And for me that meant our commitments.

I could apologise 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.

In its anniversary year, 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

co-mingled 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.

At the Met, Dan promises organisational changes,

but right now the art is under scrutiny.

How many works have the potential to offend?

Augustus Saint-Gaudens' 19th-century sculpture, Hiawatha,

is a Met favourite.

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 labelling

because we want to 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...

..recognise 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.

Will visitors feel a difference?

Only time will tell.

You want to touch the dog, you have to ask first.

Sit down.

The Samuel family arrives,

and Kelsey deactivates the Met's security system.

SHE LAUGHS

That was adorable.

To stay in business,

the museum must remain relevant to the next generation.

Lead the way, Kelsey.

Mommy wants to show you something.

The Samuel girls are the future.

The family will judge the Met by its exhibits. The first stop

is the American Wing - art telling 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.

It idealises events of Christmas night, 1776 -

an amphibious assault made my revolutionary forces,

on European occupiers in Trenton, New Jersey.

Let's take a look at this picture together.

What's one big thing that you see?

The American flag.

But 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, he's armed.

Now, do you think Washington is a strong leader in this picture?

I wouldn't say he's not doing anything.

Are you sure about that?

So he's the 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 representation of some women or people of colour 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 Washington crossing

the Delaware 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 collections were an inspiration.

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 an alternative heroic figure -

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, working 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, and in the present.

And those are political experiences because we've been colonised,

and we continue to be colonised.

Monkman's political message is delivered via his alter ego.

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, you know, when her people are displaced.

There's a lot of humour in Cree culture and in our stories,

but also, you know, as a strategy for just seducing

people into my work, I use humour as a way to kind of disarm people.

Cos 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, that's not...

..he's not one of my heroes.

The museum's two paintings are entitled Mistikosiwak

or Wooden Boat People.

The Met, in commissioning these works, they're 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 Kent Monkman's 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.

Cos he's wearing a necklace that has...

The symbol for health care, yeah. The hospital.

Oh, OK, this is interesting.

What did you notice?

And look what's on his hands.

Yeah.

Kristen! Yes?

Good job!

Leading the Met's diversity drive,

Director Max Hollein put the pictures 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 through the middle.

They have to be strong positions.

It's, on one hand, a huge opportunity but it's a challenge,

it's a challenge for the artist.

You, you push artists to, to really respond to that,

and there are certain artists who 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 Mahon works on a politically charged portrait

painted just before the French Revolution of 1789.

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.

When the uprising began, this work flaunting wealth

and privilege was suddenly dangerous - as X-rays reveal.

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 the lead.

The red paint that you see there is actually red.

Red and black in the 1780s is incredibly fashionable,

from pre-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... 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 at 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."

It does really give us a closer glimpse at the time.

Well, and Monsieur 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.

We've got to go up just like that.

Just keep it close to the wall, right?

Ready? One, two, three.

226 years after Antoine Lavoisier lost his head,

the eight-foot-tall painting is hung

in the newly renovated European Paintings gallery.

Great, thank you!

It's crooked!

Yeah, it's crooked, but at least it's hanging.

The right side needs to come down about three inches, but that...

A caption will relate the couple's downfall,

but the Met is full of the stories

of the rich, white and dead.

The selection of exhibits and their location, even the framing

and lighting, are all decisions with political dimensions,

currently prompting debate within the museum.

Up.

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.

And I don't think I'm...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.

For some curators, excellence is enough,

beauty, an end in itself.

Concerned for the spiritual welfare of their booming city,

the Met's philanthropist founders believed that by getting close to

beautiful objects, the lives of New York's workers would be improved.

One of their earliest decrees was that artists should be

allowed to come in with their sketchbooks and be inspired.

A favourite subject is a 19th-century copy of Perseus with

the head of Medusa, by Antonio Canova.

The 17th-century original was carved for the Vatican.

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.

It is European civilisation 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.

The modern and contemporary galleries

are a destination for visitors.

But, post-war, the popularity of modern art

was not reflected at the Met.

When, in the late '60s, abstract art was finally admitted,

it was mainly American works by white men.

Today, Wagstaff's galleries are full of diverse narratives.

Here, 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 affairs in 1968.

An homage to hardscrabble Harlem by Faith Ringgold.

Sheena has just bought another.

This is a piece by Rashid Johnson and it's called Five Broken Men,

representing a more generalised 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 programme of live arts events.

Let's try this way.

Lee Mingwei is a Taiwanese-American artist whose medium is performance.

He's come to the Met -

and a collaboration with dance master Bill T Jones -

with his touring work Our Labyrinth.

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 the 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 a museum, for me, is a spirit house.

OK, 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 the mandate that the

people in it are as diverse as possible.

I realised it's all about what is it to be a black, be an 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 into 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 museum's 150 years,

the American Wing Galleries have displayed home-grown 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 cognisant of what has been left out of that story.

Certainly women artists, artists of colour,

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 cos it explains

so much about where we are today.

Particularly, now, the issues we're dealing with,

with racial justice, income inequality -

it all has its roots in our history.

The Ames vase here.

The Indian Vase.

It is an extraordinary feat of carving, no question, it's a

work of art in and of itself, but it's deeply problematic.

Now we've 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 their 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 Marroquin Norby is the first-ever Native American

curator in Met history.

What I find most striking about this is the very fine craftsmanship of...

Oh, it's extraordinary! ..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 all 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 are finding kinship in deep antiquity.

We were talking about the figures, and how they were painted,

and how they look like us.

The colours 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 eight years old.

My parents gave up everything...

..for a better opportunity.

And...

Sorry.

I started to find out what my ancestry was.

And I realised that...

VOICE CRACKS

I'm sorry.

It was hard to do because...

..our ancestry is non-existent.

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 is nowhere 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.

The Temple of Dendur was built by Romans in awe of North African

gods and architectural splendour.

What do you see?

Sunlight!

SHE GASPS

The structure came to New York in 1968

when the building of Egypt's Aswan Dam threatened destruction.

It took a decade to reconstruct it in its own gallery.

We come from such rich heritage - 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.

And I wanted to give my girls a head start to learn about these things.

To realise 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 two million objects to tell their stories with.

The museum also lends and borrows on an international scale.

The Sahel Exhibition celebrates five Saharan empires

that for over 1,300 years produced great art.

Artisans working for gold-rich monarchs,

in what is now one of the poorest regions in Africa,

produced masterworks in wood,

precious metal, and clay.

Many of the 200 exhibits are loaned by African museums.

This finely-wrought solid gold pectoral,

is from a 13th-century burial mound in northern Senegal.

Visitors enter past another Senegalese treasure -

a megalith carved around the 9th century -

to stand in one of 93 stone circles along the banks of the Gambia River.

Today, the exhibition is being taken down.

The smaller objects are gone.

Time to send the massive stone back

to the Met's partner museum in Dakar.

Morning, guys.

The Head of the Met's in-house heavy lifting team is Crayton Sohan.

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 tonnes.

It's pretty heavy.

With this kind of work, there is no trial and error

cos everything we touch, it's millions and millions of dollars.

Conservator Carolyn Riccardelli regularly moves large

exhibits around the world.

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.

Come down 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.

HE CHUCKLES

Where you came from, or your colour 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 recognitions 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 head-hunting.

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 trying 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 Wing 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 that objects

were taken from a country, not sold but taken, they should be 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 a question to which Puerto Rican artist Miguel Luciano

has an answer.

He's a frequent visitor to a Rockefeller

collection of pre-Columbian Caribbean arts.

This sculpture has particular resonance,

once used in community ritual.

Luciano is part of a new Met project using art to build

links between the museum and its neighbour communities.

It's a really special object.

It was probably used in ceremonies using this

kind of hallucinogenic plant medicine.

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 in 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

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, depersonalised, 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 modelled the figure using a 3D printer.

Today he's come to a Manhattan plastics company to work on it.

This object is a Taino zemi 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. Yeah.

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.

..it might have been part of the physical

experience of taking cohoba. Hmm.

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.

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 I think be reconsidering

their own colonial past,

as they think about how to be more relevant in the present

and in the future.

Miguel's neighbourhood was once known to

New Yorkers as Spanish Harlem.

Today's community keep a bond with their Spanish-speaking cultures,

with their own name - El Barrio.

Nearly 7% of Manhattan's population hails from Puerto Rico.

Public art is on every corner.

Luciano is turning the Met's ancient carving

back into art for the public,

and, at his studio, unveiling it for an important visitor -

his mentor, the photographer Hiram Maristany.

I'm a little older than Miguel.

I'm a little older. A couple of years.

Six months older than him now. Six months!

In 1968,

the community formed the Young Lords civil rights protest movement.

Hiram was their photographer.

Today, his images still adorn the area.

In 1973, they featured in a Met show -

The Art and Heritage of Puerto Rico.

Miguel is following in Hiram's footsteps.

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 this show happens, right?

So I was born in '72. So I was three years old.

Yeah, right! Right.

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 art that I admired a couple of weeks ago.

The premier object in the show is the zemi cohoba stand.

This is a replica.

The zemi in blue.

Amazing. This still needs a lot of polishing and stuff. Mm-hm.

The idea is to actually create a venue in El Barrio,

so we can actually introduce this to... Exactly.

..the community in a way where people

can have uninterrupted access to it. It's a great piece. Thanks.

I really love it, I really love it.

I mean, it's in process so... Yeah, 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 colonised reality.

And a lot of our history was denied us. Mm-hm.

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... Yeah.

..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 thousand-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.

Now, seeing the racism inherent in his own institution

has left him dismayed.

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,

the message of authority, power.

You look at an image

but you don't have a full understanding of the back story

or the conflict that surrounds that particular image.

One picture 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 heroicised

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 endeavour.

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 honouring the contribution of the black population.

His interpretation of Washington Crossing the Delaware

immediately 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,

New Yorkers flocked to a show

that dealt head-on with the African American legacy of injustice.

Oh, look at these, Kristen!

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.

Jacob Lawrence is arguably the most important

black American artist of the 20th century.

But regardless of his race,

just he's fundamentally one of the greats.

Born in New Jersey in 1917,

Lawrence was influenced by cubism

and inspired by Harlem.

For this project he planned 60 panels, but only made 30.

Several have been lost, but now,

magically, one has been found -

property of some very surprised pensioners.

They bought it out of a charity art auction for a children's

music school in 1960 for $50.

And it's been sitting quietly in their Upper West Side

apartment ever since.

It's the feel-good story of the season,

and I think there's just such an appetite for good news.

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 may not be the most, erm, beautiful,

in the end, there is 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

cos she knows just how important this place is to me.

Next time...

The museum has a cash crisis, and many mouths to feed...

I'm glad I'm not in that position,

to juggle long-term mission with

what we're doing in a real crisis right now.

..how to fund the shows...

It's a massive undertaking.

Broadway theatre is probably the closest to this level of production.

..the research and development...

The colour palette has been a sort of shock to everyone.

This is unique.

I have to do in very good way.

..and the new roof.

And they come to you for the money for this?

I've got to find the money to do it.

The Met was built on philanthropy

but, in these troubled times, does it still exist?

It really exposes the American model of funding

of cultural institutions.

What's going to happen now?