|About the collection| Although The Metropolitan Museum of Art
made its first acquisitions among these fields—a group of
Peruvian antiquities—as early as 1882, and a pair of Mexican
eagle reliefs was given by the American artist Frederic Church
in 1893, no significant commitment to the arts of Africa,
Oceania, or the Americas was made until 1969. At that time,
Nelson A. Rockefeller offered the entire collection of a museum
that he had founded in 1954 in association with René
d'Harnoncourt, the Museum of Primitive Art, to the Metropolitan
Museum. Included in the gift were 3,300 works of art, a
specialized library, and a photographic collection. A separate
department for the care, study, and exhibition of these works
and study materials was then established at the Metropolitan.
Today the collection of the Department of the Arts of Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas is housed in the Michael C.
Rockefeller Wing, named for Nelson Rockefeller's son, who
collected many of the Asmat objects from Papua Province (wester