In a wide-ranging interview published October 13 on artnet, collector Adam Lindemann sat down with Alisa LaGamma, the Met's curator of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, to discuss restitution, the museum's $70 million rebuild of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, and the violent histories embedded in European colonial collections. LaGamma, who has worked at the museum for 31 years and led the wing for 12, traced the collection to Governor Nelson Rockefeller's 1969 gift — a radical bid to hang African, Oceanic and Ancient American art beside the Old Masters, after the Met itself initially resisted the idea. His son Michael's devotion to Asmat art ended in tragedy in 1961, when the young anthropologist drowned off Papua New Guinea. The rebuilt wing abandons its old posture as a museum within a museum for a crossroads in dialogue with neighboring Greek, European and modern galleries, layered with new digital context: audio guides recorded with intellectuals from Bamako to Bogotá, documentary films shot across sub-Saharan Africa, and workshops from Gaborone to Zanzibar that have produced new memoranda of understanding with regional partners. The interview's sharpest moments come in Brussels, where Lindemann visited the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren — founded in 1898 as a showcase for King Leopold II's Congo Free State and what LaGamma calls a unique vestige of Europe's darkest colonial chapter. She detailed how its holdings carry precise records of violent seizures, including a Kongo power figure confiscated by the privateer Alexandre Delcommune after a tariff dispute. Such documentation, she argued, is exactly why these troubled collections matter: they are precious records of what actually happened, and they should be widely accessible rather than sit in obscurity. On what museums should do with looted collections, LaGamma stopped short of prescribing a single answer — the field's ongoing debate, she suggested, is itself the work. The interview lands as restitution pressure on Western institutions keeps intensifying, from the Benin Bronzes to renewed scrutiny of how encyclopedic museums narrate the objects they hold.