© Bridgit Beyer

Although he disappeared at 23 years of age during an ethnographic expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Dutch New Guinea in 1961, Michael, the youngest of Nelson Rockefeller’s children, managed to build up a good treasure of non-Western artefacts which his father donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, alongside his own art collection. The wing that bears the ill-fated scion’s name was the institution’s first major gesture of opening up to other cultures, and it has now undergone an overhaul, under the supervision of WHY Architecture, that provides more exhibition space for hundreds of items from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.