Range Rovers

The New York Post, December 21, 2025

Range Rovers

Why New Yorkers from all walks of life can put a gun on their holiday wish list

All I want for Christmas is a snub-nosed .38. Some .38 Special ammunition would be nice too. This holiday season, we should all be thinking of our firearms wish list.

A year ago, I never thought I would be one of those rare New Yorkers to navigate the city’s byzantine gun laws. Nor did I quite anticipate the peace of mind that comes with firearms ownership.

But I did it, earning my own license to carry a concealed pistol. I now practice weekly at the range just down the block from my office with my own registered revolver. You can do it, too.

Sure, we’ve heard the stories of onerous regulations, invasive questioning and endless delays. Compared with much of the country, the application process remains a burden. But I am here to tell you it is no longer impossible. As I found, it can even be a rewarding experience. And if you want that Centennial-style hammerless Airweight in your stocking, you first need a license to carry it. 

James Panero never thought he’d be one of those rare New Yorkers to navigate the city’s byzantine gun laws — but the process has gotten easier thanks to the Supreme Court. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

My story began when I inherited an old service revolver from my father, Carl. A New York-based architect, one who had worked on designs for the World Trade Center and JFK Airport, he had taken to firearms when I was a teenager in the 1990s. He enjoyed the sport and comradery of the range, which he said reminded him of his time in Army basic training. He also saw it as a means for some father-son bonding and a reconnection with our Italian roots. 

James Panero visits Ground Zero in 2014 with his father, Carl, who worked with Minoru Yamasaki as senior staff architect designing the World Trade Center. Courtesy of James Panero

I well remember the day he first took me to John Jovino Gun Shop. The storied retailer shuttered after 109 years during the 2020 lockdowns, but at the time, the store in Little Italy was thriving as it sported an oversized pistol hanging from its sign. Dad had me pick out my own bolt-action .22 rifle. He then slipped next door to resupply his homemade winemaking operation, another Italian pastime. At an upscale range near Wall Street, now long defunct, he shot his pistol while I practiced my aim with the small, rimfire rifle. All the while, a five-gallon glass carboy of red wine fermented in our highrise West Side apartment. 

Decades later, when the time came to transfer his gun, a blued .357 Magnum manufactured by Smith & Wesson in the 1960s, I paid my first of many visits to the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range. Operating out of a basement space on West 20th Street since 1964, the range is an enduring lifeline for city gun owners. Here you can take training classes, join its shooting club, use its services as a federal firearms-licensed dealer (known as FFL) or simply try out one of its .22 rifles (no license required). 

I have done it all. But first, I sat down with Westside’s owner, Darren Leung. “I am amazed we survived,” he said of his holdout range in the heart of Gotham. “But by the good grace of God and some great members, we’re still here.”

James brings his father’s gun — now his — to the range in a locked case. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Leung went on to explain the consequences of the landmark 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen and what it meant for gun licensing in the city.

He also noted the uptick in interest in personal firearms following the 2020 riots, the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the all-too-routine evidence that you cannot always rely on others to protect you and your loved ones. “Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it,” said Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Russian founder of the Jewish Defense Organization and famous Zionist. That might well be the motto here too.

Back in my father’s day, most city gun owners could only expect to receive what was known as a premise permit. That meant you could take your firearm, unloaded in a locked container, to and from the range, and that was it. The Bruen decision changed that.

James’ story began when he inherited an old service revolver from his father. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Before Bruen, New York required its firearms applicants to show what it called “proper cause” to receive an unrestricted license. This effectively meant only diamond dealers and cash couriers could obtain anything beyond a premise permit. In 2022, the Supreme Court thought otherwise.

“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas, delivering the scathing opinion of the court in Bruen. 

“That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”

With the high court ruling that the “Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” tens of thousands of new firearms applications flooded in.

James practices weekly at the range just down the block from his Manhattan office with his own registered revolver. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Leung suggested to me that the premise permit would likely be phased out. New Yorkers should now apply for concealed carry. The NYPD licensing division handles all applications through its website. The system is an improvement over the old paper forms and the need for exact postal money orders hand-delivered to One Police Plaza. I should also add that the NYPD licensing officers who reached out to me as my application was in process were all friendly and professional.

Nevertheless, the online application has many, many steps, and it is best approached in stages. The biggest hurdle of the application process is the 18-hour training class. But here what might have been a challenge proved to be a highlight.

The author finished his weekend course with a paper test — and has gotten better since.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Each month, Westside offers sessions compacted into a single intensive weekend course. The spaces fill, so sign up early. Two dozen of us met in the cluttered Westside classroom. We sat on broken-down school desks with patriotic flags lining the walls.

The diversity of students there was a reflection of town. I sat next to the son of a police officer. Behind me was a young woman in a designer coat. Next to her, a man was speaking English as a second language. Some were longtime gun owners upgrading from premise permits. Others had never touched a firearm until the day we gathered. 

Our instructor was Glenn Herman, a wry, wiry native of Greenwich Village dressed head to toe in black (his website is appropriately titled newyorkcityguns.com). As he sprinkled in stories of his bar mitzvah, over two days we learned about the history of rifling, the relative advantages between revolvers and semi-automatics, the uses of hollow-point rounds versus full metal jacket, different holster options, sight pictures, misfires, hangfires, squib loads, the isosceles over the Weaver stance and the fundamentals of firearm safety (always point it in a safe direction, always assume it is loaded and always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire). 

Herman ended the first day by showing us the Glock he keeps in his black fanny pack. “I’m getting older and don’t care what I look like,” he explained.

10

A diverse group of New Yorkers take aim at the Westside range in the heart of Manhattan.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

For day two, things got heavier, as we reviewed the true challenges of New York’s gun laws and the legal implications of concealed carry. In response to Bruen, the Legislature imposed a host of new restrictions under its so-called sensitive-place law. These regulations state that you cannot bring a licensed firearm, loaded or unloaded, through much of town, including parks, public transport, restaurants and the “Times Square Exclusion Zone.” Haven’t you seen the signs?

Such restrictions will almost certainly be challenged on constitutional grounds, as they effectively nullify the protections of Bruen. Nevertheless, until then, law-abiding New Yorkers must remain cognizant of the many new impositions. Of course, we should not assume the same cognizance of New York’s criminal class.

Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Before we finished the weekend course with a paper test and a live-fire drill with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic, Herman went over the ethical challenges that come with concealed carry.

“The city will be different for you when you have a loaded firearm,” he explained. “You must train your mind first to be nonviolent. Cultivate a mindset where your instincts are good and deadly force is used only after all other options have been exhausted, where you have nowhere left to escape, and life is on the line.”

Herman guided us to further study with such gun gurus as Massad Ayoob. His online tutorials on the many nuances of firearms literacy, from grip and stance to legal implications and how to talk to law enforcement, are all must-see.

Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

With the testing done and paperwork submitted, I received my appointment for police fingerprinting.

A few months later, my temporary approval came in, which meant I could finalize the process of getting my dad’s revolver on my license.

In many states, you can simply walk into a gun shop and walk out with a pistol. You can also inherit a firearm like anything else.

Not so in New York. Each firearm must pass through a dealer and be registered to your license before it can be released.

You can also only register one firearm every 90 days. Again, Westside shepherded this process along for me and held onto my pistol until it was cleared.

Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

But I got it, and my concealed-carry license arrived in the mail.

The approval meant I could join the Westside range and shoot whenever I liked.

The old basement range, which has changed little since a scene from “Taxi Driver” was filmed there half a century ago, welcomes all with its donuts and coffee and bonhomie. 

I am no great marksman, but I can see incremental improvements in my weekly practice.

Lining up a gun with a target is easy. Keeping it on target as you pull the trigger and handle its recoil, and doing this consistently, is the challenge.

I think of my father firing that same gun. The smell of the gunpowder takes me back to those teenage years with him on the range.

The author poses with his father, Carl Panero, on Gramercy Park after his daughter’s baby naming at the National Arts Club in 2010. Courtesy of James Panero

Still, I wouldn’t mind trying out a smaller pistol.

My Magnum is too large and heavy for pocket carry.

A smaller five-shooter might be in order. Or maybe I should go for a Colt 1911.

Most shooters have moved away from wheel guns altogether in favor of plastic semi-automatic 9-millimeters, such as the Glock.

In any case, it’s nice to have options on your holiday wish list. I’m sure Jabotinsky would agree.

Inside the Cult of Equinox

THE SPECTATOR, September 15, 2025

Inside the Cult of Equinox

Fueled by a mysterious marketing campaign, the gym now has more than 100 outposts

Scratch the surface of Silver Age Rome and what do you find? Most likely, a tight subterranean vault built as a meeting room for the followers of Mithras. This Persian mystery cult was everywhere in the early Anni Domini, coming to prominence between the decline of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, filling that gap between the gods of Olympus and the God of Moses. The cult’s dark temples, the Mithraea, squeezed devotees into opposing benches designed to make them uncomfortable, all while in communion with their fellow initiates. Today, sociologists might call a Mithraeum a “third place.” Here was the kind of space where Roman men who had become disillusioned with Jupiter Stator could go between work and home to be purified together in a shower of bull’s blood.

The modern gym is one of our own ubiquitous third places, but only the urban fitness chain known as Equinox has positioned itself as an upscale mystery cult. “COMMIT TO SOMETHING,” beckons the gnostic advertising campaign of this self-described “high-performance lifestyle leader.” When presented with the accompanying outsize images obstructing the gym’s windows, we might well wonder: commit to what?

Launched in 1991, the gym now has more than 100 outposts spread across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Houston and Washington, DC, as well as London, Toronto and Vancouver. The Equinox campaign started by the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy in 2016, diverged notably from the standard gym appeal of “improving lives through fitness” or “member-friendly memberships that won’t break the bank,” as the bargain-basement New York Sports Club might say. First shot by Steven Klein – whom the New Yorker described as creating “fashion photography with a pistol and a pulse” for his images that “teetered between the seductive and the sadistic” – the Equinox campaign was far from mens sana in corpore sano. It wasn’t even about going to the gym at all.

Instead, we saw a model etching a tattoo over what remained of her preemptive double mastectomy. “Scars aren’t ugly,” she said in the video component. “Scars are really just beautiful badges reminding you what you chose to go against; not just the size of your opponent but the size of your commitment.” Other materials presented a young man with a paralyzing stutter. “Your commitment tells your story better than you ever could,” he eked out. In another, three deaf cheerleaders signed in unison. In another, a model cut her hands practicing the harp as blood ran down her instrument. In another, a naked man received a haircut and manicure-pedicure as a small mirror covered his pudendum. In another, a woman breastfed two babies at her table at a restaurant. In yet another, a shirtless man was soon covered in bees.

At the time, Equinox promoted its campaign as an “intimate, provocative and deeply moving exploration of personal identity” that “confronts current cultural issues and asserts that commitment has the power to define who we are in the deepest sense.”

This year, Equinox updated the approach with a shoot by the British fashion photographer Charlotte Wales that extended these themes: a model licks a leather boot; a woman lies on a bed of nails as a robotic arm sticks her with a hypodermic needle; another model (this time transsexual) walks side by side with an AI version of their likeness covered in metallic parts. “Commitment is obsessed,” reads Equinox’s latest ad copy. “It’s now. It’s relentless. Always one step ahead. Abandon half-measures. Surrender to your urges. Sacrifice for obsession. Commitment isn’t a choice. It’s an awakening. Let desire drive you. Commit to something.”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here? To hammer home the infernal message, Equinox throws extra shade on those who make that naive New Year’s resolution to get in shape. “If you waited for the ball to drop, you dropped the ball,” advises the gym. “On January 1, we blocked new membership sign-ups. Because commitment doesn’t start when the calendar resets. It’s for those who are all in. Not when the ball drops, the clock strikes, or the calendar flips – but always.”

So what if you can’t commit to the gym, the message goes. You should really be committed to an intensive-care unit. Or a mental asylum. Or you should receive a felony charge. But in truth, the “something” to which one mainly commits at Equinox is a mid-four-figure annual fee.

The real mystery of Equinox is what you get for the expense. In June, New York attorney general Letitia James won a $600,000 judgment against the company by arguing that its contractual agreements were too hard to break. The award of a mere $250 to each of the plaintiffs – which equaled less than a month of dues, to say nothing of the initiation fee – left members less than impressed. “Tish gets ripped!” ran the New York Post headline. “New Yorkers not impressed with AG Letitia James’s crackdown on gyms.”

Equinox positions its membership as fast-track admission to the cosmopolitan faith. At the root of such modern urbanism, of course, is masochism. High taxes, crowded subways and filthy streets appeal to the broken-window theory in reverse: that our souls will only get better if our city lives get worse. Professional sadists such as New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani therefore thrive in the same way as that Equinox spin instructor who comes around to crank up your bike’s resistance. It’s all about abnegating the flesh and globalizing the intifada to a techno beat. In one early Equinox advertisement, a screaming, shirtless woman holds up her fist in front of a classical building surrounded by a night-time security detail. Just what she is protesting does not matter so much as the appearance of her consequence-free LARPing. (She is portrayed by the fitness model Bianca Van Damme, daughter of the “muscles from Brussels” Jean-Claude Van Damme.)

Equinox members may not be true basement-dwelling “Brooklynites for Gaza,” but they are content to go along with the latest thing as long as the towels are stocked and the steam room stays open. We all signed up to be in this Paul Verhoeven-movie of a place, and that’s life in the big city.

“A manic attempt to make the posthuman sexy,” is how one agnostic member explained it to me. “I have the distressing sense that I am beholding another stripe – or, heaven forbid, chevron – on the ghastly and vexillologically metastasizing ‘progress flag.’ The clientele strikes me as being finance and finance-adjacent bros plus gay men for whom human growth hormone, rather than Ozempic, is still the lifestyle supplement of choice. As for the women, I’d have no idea. I don’t notice.”

Not noticing is a big part of the Equinox culture. Members don’t converse. Most employ monastic silence as they move from station to station, carrying their water bottles and iPhones upon which a small dog must be featured on the lock screen. No grunts. Little sweat. The chilled eucalyptus towels see to that. After reports a decade ago of problems in the steam room, the facility posted signs of a “zero-tolerance policy regarding inappropriate, sexual or lewd behavior. Our staff is on notice.” The closest most come to catching a sexually transmitted disease at today’s Equinox is when a form of athlete’s foot requires an oral course of fungicide (I now wear shower shoes).

And yet, past the many cult symbols that line its entry, Equinox tends to be well-maintained and almost always uncrowded. Bottles of four different soaps and lotions line each shower stall: a shampoo and conditioner of rose, pepper and sage; a facial cleanser of aloe, geranium and rose; a body cleanser of chamomile, bergamot and rose. Additional bottles of face and body cream are available in the locker rooms. So too are Q-Tips, deodorant, mouthwash, razors, even a container of black hair ties to maintain one’s man bun. The only recent controversy here occurred a year ago, when Equinox switched out its Kiehl’s line of products for Grown Alchemist, a brand that can also be purchased at (gasp) Target.

My Equinox membership grants me access to all the spin classes and boxing sessions my heart desires. There is a mobile media library showing the proper use of every exercise machine – something I found particularly useful as I recovered from a suite of orthopedic setbacks. With my level of membership, I can visit the Flatiron location across from my office, the Upper West Side location next to my apartment, the Columbus Circle location with the saltwater pool and just about every other location save for the nirvana that is the new Equinox Hudson Yards, which would cost me another $50 a month. Perhaps one day I too will join this “most spacious, thoughtful, and connected Equinox ever… the purest expression of high-performance living yet. The 60,000-square-foot luxury destination spans two floors and includes a 15,000-square-foot pool and sundeck.”

Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been spotted in his Make America Healthy Again jeans and hiking boots, lifting at Equinox. At some point we all reach that moment in life when we realize our aging frames must be committed to a daily routine of physical therapy.

By spending more than $300 a month with a company that advertises personal destruction, many urban professionals may feel they have purchased some progressive blessing on their self-care. For others such as myself, Equinox is simply a very nice gym.

Preference for the Primitive

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2025

Preference for the primitive

On the newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What to make of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, dedicated to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and ancient America? Astonishing, frightening, and baffling are three words that come to mind—and that’s more a reflection of the curatorial and architectural decisions that have been made here than of the tribal art on display.

Some 1,800 works from five different continents are newly jumbled together across 40,000 square feet in the rebooted galleries, which reopened on May 31 after a four-year closure and $70 million redo. New “diagonal trajector[ies]” have been “designed to foreground ancestral connections and Indigenous temporalities,” according to the Met’s opening announcement. “[N]ew perspectives on Indigenous concepts of the natural world as well as nuanced perceptions of gender roles” have been “newly framed by Indigenous perspectives.” Meanwhile, new cacophonies of “wall text and digital narratives placed throughout the galleries elevate Indigenous voices, foregrounding the latest developments in interdisciplinary scholarship.” Good luck just keeping track of what region a work is from or even what continent you think you are looking at. Devised by the appropriately named WHY Architecture, in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle and the Met’s design department, these galleries have been positioned to keep you guessing.

The cultural muddle, now arranged in a labyrinth of gleaming white walls and glass screens, is made all the more confusing in a blinding resplendence, illuminated by reglazed windows onto Central Park, that is visually appealing but programmatically suspect. Aztec, Asmat, Asante: sightlines bleed from one culture into the next. Under the curation of Alisa LaGamma (African art), Joanne Pillsbury (ancient Americas), and Maia Nuku (Oceania), what were once separate sections dedicated to distinct regions are now demarcated with barely a line on the floor.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

This new open-plan design has been proposed to “suggest the unique spatial and relational dynamics of Oceania: horizon lines, the arching dome of the sky, and islands tethered in a vast ocean.” Elsewhere, it’s meant to take “inspiration from ancient American architectural traditions.” Along the ceiling, there are now “horizontal baffles that suggest ribbing to pay homage to one of Africa’s most celebrated structures: the Great Mosque of Jenne in Mali.” Such tossed-off, facile references are the window dressing of an Apple Store aesthetic selling Global South 2.0, with often brutal cultures that were oceans apart from one another—cultures that might as soon have killed, sacrificed, and devoured each other if they could.

With some exceptions, many of these works have been on display at the Met since this wing first opened in 1982. What’s different now are the hundreds of wall labels that surround them, justify them, and defend their continued display. Such justification is not for nothing. Across the park, at the American Museum of Natural History, entire galleries are being boarded up and turned into halls of shame. Generations of schoolchildren may wonder why the AMNH’s models of Eastern Woodland longhouses are suddenly treated as entartete Kunst. As the American Museum of Natural History “embraces new regulations,” reads one explanation plastered onto a hastily erected plywood screen, “these Halls displayed artifacts that may be objects of cultural significance, and the Museum does not have consent to display them.” If a museum can no longer display “objects of cultural significance,” one should wonder what remains beyond the gift shop.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

Free of the baggage of consensual anthropology, the Metropolitan has faced the opposite conundrum: how to add ethnographic context to its otherwise disconnected displays, often collected merely for their aesthetic attributes (especially as they relate to modern Western art). The resulting pronouncements in the renovated wing make a number of contortions to please contemporary sensibilities, even promoting the violence informing the hall’s artistic expression. Just consider the wall label titled “Generating Vitality in the Asmat World”:

Unlike women who can support life within their own bodies, Asmat men wishing to capture nature’s generative capacities once did so through the act of headhunting. This practice—an important aspect of male ritual prestige before its prohibition in the twentieth century by Dutch colonial authorities—involved pursuing a rival and taking his life. Since the human head contains the most concentrated source of vitality, its capture (and the preservation of the skull in particular) catalyzed future cycles of growth and rebirth for humans, ancestors, and the natural world.

Like the sweetmeats of a carved-up head, there is much to extract from such a statement. In short, before the prohibition of cannibalism in New Guinea by colonial authorities and the arrival of Catholic missionaries, for peoples such as the Asmat, the depth of their creative expression was a direct testament to the ferocity of their bloodlust. Headhunting may indeed have been an “important aspect of male ritual prestige,” but one is left wondering if the victims of the Asmat regret the Dutch arrival in the East Indies. Try justifying anti-colonialism to a shrunken head.

The radical relativism of the ethno-aesthetics on display in the Met’s confounding galleries is the capstone to a long-range project, one that has less to do with prehistoric third-world cultures and more with the obsessions of modern Western taste. Beyond the story of the family of man, these particular galleries are ultimately about the family of Rockefeller.

“Primitive” is a word that has been so thoroughly expunged from any mention in this wing that its absence belies a lingering presence. That’s part of the untold story here, scrubbed from the countless wall labels and disclosures of “provenance”: there would be no Met wing dedicated to the arts of Africa, ancient America, and Oceania without the Rockefellers’ primitivist passions and the tragic intergenerational dynamics that came as a consequence of their zeal.

“The more you prefer the primitive,” wrote the art historian E. H. Gombrich, “the less you can become primitive.” In the modern world, simplicity, subjectivity, even crudity can appeal to sophisticated taste as elite culture looks for deeper truths beneath the polish of refinement. The Rockefellers have certainly taken this view to heart. Over successive generations, the family has shown a distinct preference for the primitive in their cultural philanthropy, from their support for American folk art to the primitivist turn of international modernism. Abby Aldrich Rockfeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., helped establish both Colonial Williamsburg and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1957, her son, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, founded the Museum of Primitive Art in a townhouse on the same block as MOMA as well as their former city residence. Headed up by the wide-ranging art historian Robert Goldwater, inspired by modernism’s primitivist influences and Paris’s Musée du Trocadéro, the Museum of Primitive Art as its name implied sought to elevate the traditional sculpture and textiles of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania from artifact to the level of high art.

Beginning in the 1960s, through the intermediation of René d’Harnoncourt, then the director of MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller began transferring these primitive works to the Metropolitan. He not only seeded a collection where none existed but also underwrote the construction of the wing to house it. Even today, some one-third of the works in the Met’s primitive collection passed through Rockefeller hands, including many of its most notable pieces, such as a Dogon blacksmith’s Priest with Raised Arms (1300s–1600s), the Eyema byeri (reliquary guardian figure) (1800s–early 1900s) of an Okak-Fang artist, and the Gwandansu figure (1400s–1600s) by a Bamana numuw (blacksmith). Since the term “primitive” has now become outmoded and even deeply regretted, the Met’s wall labels and provenancial literature identify all of these works as merely having passed through “MPA,” never once explaining that the acronym is short for Museum of Primitive Art.

This is but one of the many sleights of hand in the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—originally known as the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing. Far more significant is the disappearance (then and now) of Michael Clark Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, for whom the wing is named. A “memorial” would suggest a death, but the Met has whitewashed the tragedy of his involvement in these galleries, now merely stating that he was

greatly inspired by the cultures and art of the Pacific and pursued new avenues of inquiry into artistic practice during his travels there. Among the wing’s signature works are the striking Asmat sculptures he researched and collected in southwest New Guinea.

What gets left unsaid is that Michael, a year out of college, disappeared while collecting those very sculptures—trading sachets of tobacco for totemic bis poles, adorned with references to shrunken heads, that now dominate the wing named in his honor. As an added tragedy, Michael may have become the victim of the same cannibalistic culture he was intent on discovering and collecting. Departing from the official Harvard-Peabody Expedition that first brought him to study the Ndani people in the Baliem Valley in the Central Highlands of Western New Guinea in early 1961, he pursued the works of the Asmat in a two-man mission, floating along the coast of New Guinea aboard a catamaran jury-rigged from two canoes. On November 18 of that year, his catamaran capsized in the swift crosscurrents of the mouth of the Eilanden, or Betsj, River. He gathered together a knife and compass and tethered up the boat’s gas tanks as a personal flotation device, determined to make for shore. He was last seen swimming away by his crewmate, the Dutch anthropologist René Wassing, who held onto the wreckage and was recovered the following day, along with Michael’s journals.

Michael C. Rockefeller with Papuan natives in New Guinea, 1961.

Published six years later, the journals speak of Michael’s harrowing infatuation with these cannibals. Facing the specter of his parents’ impending divorce, wishing to please his father, then the governor of New York, by contributing to his Museum of Primitive Art, Michael pursued the Asmat at his own peril. As he wrote in his journal:

What we saw were some imposing remnants of a marvelous past. I suppose not so marvelous from a Christian point of view, for the Asmats were a ferocious headhunting people constantly engaged in inter-village war and raids of varying degrees of deadliness. However, the sculpture that has been and (in some areas) is being produced by Asmat artists is unquestionably some of the greatest to come from a primitive culture . . . .

And equally as remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produces it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago almost the whole area was headhunting.

Afinal Rockefeller in this tragedy is Mary Rockefeller Morgan, Michael’s fraternal twin sister. Now eighty-seven years old, she has been a vocal donor to the renovation. Her brother is now absent from the public side of the wing that bears his name—and most likely that’s the point. With new sightlines that connect Nelson’s Priest with Raised Arms with Michael’s bis poles beyond, this wing feels like a private family shrine as never before. While publicly drawing us into its purely expressive wonders, this primitive collection has a private side that tells a very different story.