Following the recent refurbishment of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center invites leading scholars to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for international museums in presenting the arts and cultures of the Pacific. Dr. Maia Nuku (Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Curator for Oceanic Art in the Metropolitan Museum), who coordinated the reinstallation of the galleries of Oceanic art, will moderate. Taking the new exhibition as a starting point, the panelists will raise issues about art and architecture and discuss the rich conceptual values that inform the distinctive visual output and built environment produced by Indigenous Pacific and Islander communities who live and work in the vast region known as Oceania. Challenges include overcoming cultural unfamiliarity and the persistence of stereotypes, confronting the consequences of past and present colonialism, and addressing the resilience of Oceanic identities in what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa called “Our Sea of Islands.”


An Indigenous Arts in Transition Event.

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Healoha Johnston is an art historian living in Kaiwiki, Hawai‘i. She is director of cultural resources and curator for Hawaiʻi and Pacific arts and culture at Bishop Museum. Johnston’s exhibitions and research projects explore connections between historic visual culture and contemporary art with a particular focus on the sociopolitical underpinnings that inform those relationships. She served as chief curator and curator of the arts of Hawaiʻi, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas at the Honolulu Museum of Art, worked in contemporary art galleries and NOAA’s Pacific National Monument program, and the Smithsonian Institution as part of the American Women’s History Initiative and Asian Pacific American Center before joining Bishop Museum.

Fred Myers, professor of anthropology (retired) at NYU, is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research with Pintupi-speaking Indigenous people in Australia since 1973 on their relationships to land, structures of sociality, and their art and its circulation. His work explores the significance of art and material culture as a point of articulation, a mediation between the values and expectations of Indigenous people and institutions of the outside world. He has written three monographs, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (1986); Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2002); and Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation (with Terry Smith, 2024). Edited volumes that explore some crucial fields of cultural production include The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology and Art (coedited with George Marcus, 1995); The Empire of Things (2001); Experiments in Self-Determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia (coedited with Nicolas Peterson, 2016); The Difference that Identity Makes (with Tim Rowse and Laurie Bamblett, 2019); and The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions (coedited with T. Bennett, D. Stevenson, and T. Winikoff, 2020). Myers has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.

Albert L. Refiti’s research centers around the Moananui (Polynesian) and broader Oceania notions of space and time (vā/wā). His time at Bard Graduate Center focuses on archival data and living testimony about building forms and practices, to complete a book that traces common elements and establishes a baseline for properly articulating the historic and current links between Moananui buildings and contemporary architectural practice. To that end, the research aims to establish a genealogy of Moananui and Oceanic buildings to distill the common ancestry of building designs and the practices of expert artisans, such as tufuga, kahuna, and tōhunga. This extends and consolidates a record of the distribution of Oceanic built forms and their use to identify factors that contribute to contemporary renaissances in Indigenous architecture in the region. Refiti is the coeditor of The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture (Springer, 2018); Pacific Spaces: Translations and Transmutations (Berghahn, 2022); and The Concept of Vā: Relationality; Time and Space in the Pacific and Beyond (ANU Press, forthcoming). The fellowship will culminate in the production of a manuscript for a book titled Cosmogonic Artefacts: Spatial Exposition of Pacific Architecture.

Maia Nuku Born in London of English and Māori (Ngai Tai) descent, Dr. Maia Nuku is Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Curator for Oceanic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Nuku’s doctoral research focused on eighteenth-century collections of Polynesian art, and she completed two collaborative postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge in England (2008–14) researching Oceanic art collections alongside Pacific artists and practitioners. At the Met, Nuku has evolved a curatorial approach that centers Indigenous Pacific perspectives, grounding the presentation of visual arts in the unique conceptual and cosmological connections that make art from Oceania so compelling. Her exhibition The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors of Oceania traveled to the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai (June 1–Aug 20, 2023) and the National Museum of Qatar in Doha (Oct 23, 2023–Jan 15, 2024). Nuku has just overseen a major reinstallation of the Oceania galleries at the Met, which showcase the creativity of Indigenous Pacific artists from the eighteenth century to the present through the lenses of global history, Indigenous storytelling, and Pacific oratory and performance.

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Object Labs
At BGC, we use an object-centered approach to advance the study of the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Join our student educators before select public events to learn about some of the objects in BGC’s Study Collection. Each week we will showcase three objects carefully selected from the collection, which includes over 4,000 objects in a variety of media.

October 22 and 29; November 5, 12, and 19; December 3
38 West 86th Street, 5–6 pm

Founded in 2011, the BGC Study Collection supports student research by providing opportunities for hands-on close examination of objects. Learn more about the BGC Study Collection here.