This weekend, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will be opening its galleries of the Arts of Oceania to the public for the first time since 2021.

That's after a major renovation that allowed curators to reimagine how to present art from the vast region,

which includes the more than 10,000 Pacific Islands in Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown got a preview of the new galleries, which feature some of

the museum's largest and most storied works for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

This is grand imposing. This is the Quoma ceiling.

Soaring above one of the Met's new galleries of Oceania,

one of the museum's most iconic artworks from the Pacific.

Made by artists from the Quoma people of northeast Papua New Guinea,

the installation represents the ceiling of a men's ceremonial house, typically the largest and most sacred building in a Cuoma village.

Each individual panel is infused with meaning,

painted with symbols associated with different village clans,

says curator Maya Nuku, who spoke to us even as final touches

for the reopening were being completed.

You've got a fabulous set of crocodile eyes there in this gray one with the yellow eyes in pairs coming down.

And then you put it together and it becomes the universe.

From a quamer perspective, that's right, yes.

Originally commissioned in the early 1970s, it's now been rearranged according to the wishes

of the descendants of the original artists to accurately reflect clan groupings.

They had a lot of input into how we reconfigured this new iteration.

It's critical for them to be able to have a say in how they're represented.

It's just one example of how the museum has rethought and re-contextualized its installation

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