Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
More than 11,000 works from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America.
Ancestral authority, cosmology, and political regalia.
his department encompasses over eleven thousand works created across sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Indigenous Americas. Produced by societies with complex cosmological and ancestral systems, these objects operated as instruments of political authority, lineage record, and spiritual mediation.
An intricate Maya polychrome vessel, a 16th-century Benin Court brass plaque, a monumental Asmat ancestor pole: these works challenge Western hierarchies that once segregated material culture into decorative craft or ethnographic specimen. They represent distinct, fully realized artistic canons operating on their own structural terms.