In 1961, Michael C. Rockefeller—Harvard graduate, anthropologist, youngest son of then–New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller—disappeared off the coast of Dutch New Guinea. He was 23. His stated aim was idealistic, romantic, and, in hindsight, unsettlingly ambitious: to immerse himself in Asmat culture and acquire art—specifically, the imposing bisj poles carved by the Asmat people in ceremonial homage to the dead. These towering, spindled forms had captured his imagination, and he believed they belonged in the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, the precursor to the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Met.
On November 19 of that year, after his catamaran capsized in choppy waters, Rockefeller swam for shore with two plastic jerrycans tied around his waist. He was never seen again.
What followed was a media storm, an official presumption of drowning, and decades of speculation laced with lurid colonial drama. Some said he was killed in revenge for an earlier Dutch raid on the village of Otsjanep. Others suggested he was eaten—his bones carved into arrowheads or utensils, his presence mythologized in local oral histories. Carl Hoffman’s 2014 book Savage Harvest gave credence to these accounts, piecing together testimonies and missionary reports long buried by official silence. Whether he drowned or met a more violent end, the mystery only heightened the magnetic pull of his story.
Now, nearly sixty-five years later, his absence has been quietly institutionalized. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has reopened its newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, and with it, renewed a conversation that was never quite over.
Gone are the outdated displays that once treated Indigenous objects as anthropological artifacts. In their place, a more intentional curation gives voice to the aesthetics, histories, and spiritual systems that these works once embodied—and, in many cases, still do. More than 400 Asmat works—many of which Rockefeller himself helped collect—now anchor a space that aims to resist the very colonial framing that birthed it.
It is an effort at recontextualization, yes, but also at reckoning. The museum seems to know that these objects bear the burden of a complex lineage. Rockefeller’s disappearance is not just a personal tragedy or a tabloid curiosity—it is the ghost behind the glass, hovering over every bisj pole and ceremonial shield.
His sister, Mary Rockefeller Morgan, has long maintained that he drowned. As a psychotherapist, she has written movingly of the liminal space grief occupies when there is no body, no closure. For her, this reopening is a kind of reburial—an architectural ritual, one finally befitting the weight of a vanished life. “It’s fulfilling my father’s dream and Michael’s dream,” she recently told the New York Post.
But dreams are double-edged, especially when tethered to empire. What does it mean to collect the spiritual art of another culture under the guise of preservation? When does appreciation slip into extraction? And how do institutions confront their own complicity in this transfer of cultural memory?
These questions are etched, if not answered, in the walls of the new wing. The works are stunning: haunting, intricate, monumental. They radiate the same formal energy that once transfixed Rockefeller, and it’s easy to see why he believed they belonged in New York. But it’s also easy to feel the dissonance—that a life was lost in the pursuit of this beauty, and that a culture’s sacred heritage now lives half a world away, behind glass.
In reopening the Rockefeller Wing, the Met has done more than cut a ribbon. It has cracked open a legacy—rich, unresolved, and impossible to forget. The space stands not only as a shrine to a vanished collector but as a challenge to the museum’s own role in the stories it tells, and the ones it refuses to.
The bisj poles remain. They reach skyward like question marks. Their silence speaks volumes.
