Cruz Garcia, a professor at Iowa State University and Columbia GSAPP, taught a studio about decolonizing The Met with Nathalie Frankowski. “Teaching about colonialism at Columbia as it brutalizes its own anti-colonial students means confronting a simple, violent truth: The institutions that shape our understanding of history are the ones trying to keep real, critical history away from us,” Garcia told AN in regard to the Rockefeller Wing’s reopening.
“The recent reopening of the Rockefeller Wing at The Met—framed by the New York Times as a celebration of the ‘family of collectors, and Indigenous art’—is a case study in how power sanitizes itself,” Garcia added.
“In our classes, we’ve dissected how museums like The Met function not as neutral repositories of culture, but as active enforcers of colonial logic, where loot is rebranded as patrimony, violence is aestheticized into silence, and asymmetrical power is rendered as transactional provenance.
The Rockefellers are emblematic of this machinery.”
Garcia is critical of writers who overlook this history. “When we encounter a Taíno zemi, made by my ancestors, in the Rockefeller Wing, we don’t see an artifact; we see a corporate-colonial pipeline, one that runs from the genocidal conquest of the Caribbean to the Ivy League classrooms where these histories are still too often softened into ‘critique.’”
