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The Ancient Americas, Curated: Developing Institutional Collections

  • Ellen Hoobler
  • Victoria Isabel Lyall

The field of the ancient Americas, both as a discipline of art-historical study and as a collecting department within art museums in the United States, is comparatively young. Initially grouped with the social sciences, the study of ancient American aesthetics and culture emerged gradually. While it is beyond the scope of this introduction to trace the full history of the acquisition and display of these collections within US art museums, this volume is the first to bring together intertwined and local histories. Through the lens of twelve art museums, this volume offers a broad introduction to some of the key events, exhibitions, historical context, and, particularly, the people from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day that shaped this history. While recent initiatives and volumes have brought new focus on individual collectors of ancient American works, the story of their acquisition and public display within art museums is almost completely untold.1 There is not even a comprehensive list, as exists in other fields, of all the institutions that hold works in this area.2

The ancient Americas collections discussed here represent the material output of communities living south of the US-Mexico border, made prior to the arrival of Europeans. Within the United States, this material has always been temporally and geographically defined, rooted in the past, and interpreted through a European lens. Previously referred to as “primitive,” “Indian,” “pre-Columbian,” “prehispanic,” or “New World,” the preferred term today for this material is “ancient American.”3 This is admittedly imprecise, as the term “ancient” for the European past refers to a period ending about 400 CE, whereas the “ancient Americas” encompasses works made prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, over a millennium later.

The following essays describe how ancient American art has been collected, exhibited, and, more broadly, how American art museums constructed, and shaped, public perception of its meaning from the nineteenth century to the present.4 Even though the formation and functions of art museums have changed over time, here we think of art museums as having “a basic skeleton of three principal functions: collection, research, and public programs.”5 In very general terms, museum personnel was responsible for prioritizing the works’ aesthetic qualities over historical importance and other factors, for making those works available to scholars (and, occasionally, to the general public) for study and artistic inspiration, and for organizing exhibitions, publications, and lectures aimed at general and scholarly audiences. Like libraries and archives, museums serve as memory institutions, sites where cultural and historical memories are preserved through a distinct interpretive lens. Yet this framing has shifted many times over the late nineteenth century through the twenty-first. Recently, scholars have reevaluated the processes of narration and the resignification of objects in museum exhibitions.6 As interdisciplinary scholar James Clifford has remarked, museums are “contact zones . . . as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship—a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull.”7

That push and pull extends even to the terms used to refer to this art. In this volume, authors use different terms to describe museum collections, a reflection of this material’s marginalized status within the field of greater art history. One of the more popular terms has been “primitive art.” The term has no inherent meaning, rather as anthropologist Shelly Errington makes clear, the word “primitive” acts as a foil for the progressive nation-states of Western society. Anything, or anyone, falling outside the narrative of progress is interpreted as lesser than: underdeveloped, unsophisticated, unambitious.8 The literary theorist Marianna Torgovnick has noted that the term “primitive” implies an acceptance of “the West as norm and . . . the rest as inferior, different, deviant, subordinate, and subordinatable.”9 Initially, art historians applied the term to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European art, before the height of the Renaissance; however, by the late nineteenth century, it would refer exclusively to non-Western peoples, societies, and their aesthetic creations. Within the art market, the term became nearly codified as referring to people and works from Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas, sometimes including Native American peoples of the US but rarely including Asia. In other words, the term became a shorthand for subjects, peoples, and territories colonized by European imperial powers.

The term “primitive” and its associations proved remarkably durable, despite the fact that the cultures and communities referred to rarely shared any geographic, cultural, or linguistic connections. Academic institutions have long since disregarded the fictive unifying principles of primitive art; however, the concept has persisted in the museum organizational structure because of the existence of departments stewarding collections representing the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas (AOAA) were often called Primitive Art departments.10 A trope that unites the collections of these departments, parodied by Errington in her book, is that of the “discovery narrative,” a tale that recounts how people of note (she cites the case of the artist Pablo Picasso) “discover” primitive art, “rescue” it from obscurity, and “elevate” it so it can be celebrated within the realm of “fine art.”11 Art historian Susan Vogel and artist Fred Wilson similarly have addressed and poked fun at the supposed transformation of a primitive art object from artifact to art.12

While African and Oceanic (and at times Native American) art have been called primitive, ancient American art has held a unique place within this rubric. At different times, it has been seen as primitive but also as the important production of hemispheric neighbors, a uniquely American inspiration for industrial design, and, in more recent years, an ancestral source of inspiration and encouragement. Every museum’s collection reflects these tensions and many other considerations, including its financial resources, geographic location, the historical moment(s) when it was collecting, personnel working at a given time, and mission. The ten chapters in this volume show how historical and cultural factors have affected ancient American art’s inclusion and framing within art museums and, ultimately, within the field of art history. Not previously synthetically described or analyzed, these four overarching factors include: the rise of modernism, the use of ancient American motifs and techniques for industrial design inspiration, Indigenismo in Latin America and the United States, and Pan-Americanist policies.

The Role of Modernism in the Acceptance of Ancient American Art

By the late nineteenth and especially early twentieth centuries, there was a broader understanding of what constituted fine art. The rise of photography meant that mimetic realism no longer had to be the goal of art. Accordingly, many artists began looking elsewhere for inspiration and artistic goals. Many European modernists, notably Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and his circle, sought inspiration in African art, but others also looked to ancient American models. Art historian and archaeologist Barbara Braun points to a range of international artists who were inspired by these works for reasons of heritage, intellectual curiosity, or aesthetic preference.13

The leap from artifact to objet d’art resulted from fundamental shifts in signification that occurred during the nineteenth century when ancient American collections ceased to be the exclusive province of natural history museums. A 1912 exhibition of Maya works at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has long been assumed to be the first presentation of these works as art in an American art museum.14 Although it included approximately one hundred items from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the notice of the exhibition was only one-and-a-half pages long and was situated between longer articles that enthused over the acquisition of a single Chinese artwork.15 The notice was written by the exhibition’s curator, Alfred Marston Tozzer, a Harvard anthropologist. Tozzer closed the notice by explaining that the exhibition would “show visitors ignorant of the field of American archaeology that there was something in this country in pre-Columbian times worthy of the name of art.”16 As anthropology museums became popular with modern artists, the works they contained became sources of artistic inspiration. For example, American artist Max Weber (1881–1961) composed an ode to a Chac Mool figure at the American Museum of Natural History.17 British critic Roger Fry, who was a champion of European modernism, was also cited by Braun and others as key to changing attitudes about ancient American works. Fry greatly influenced artist Henry Moore (1898–1986) to embrace ancient American forms, particularly through his essay “American Archaeology” that first appeared in November 1918. Here, Fry observed that “it is only in this century that, after considering them from every other point of view, we have begun to look at [ancient American objects] seriously as works of art.”18 In the 1920s, as Mexican Muralism, fed by ancient American sources, gained popularity, Fry’s was one of the few available essays by an art critic that was available to English-speaking readers.

These readers could also become collectors. Though there was no cultural affinity or connection between works from Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas, they were often shown together, and dealers of African art, including many mentioned in this volume—Charles Ratton, Pierre Matisse, the Brummer Galleries—sold works from the ancient Americas as well. These merchants also often sold modern art and catered to those who were interested in it. Indeed, it was these dealers, and later curators, who promoted ancient American art within modernist circles. Errington locates the emergence and institutionalization of “authentic Primitive” art in the years between 1935 and 1984.19 At the beginning of this period, in 1935, curator James Johnson Sweeney organized the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He wrote of the vitality of the “plastic forms” of African art, a term that would be applied over and over again to ancient American works as well.20 Those works that hewed closest to the ideal of the primitive were often those with great formal simplicity. The more stripped down and abstracted, the better. Those who created such works could also be imagined to have extremely simple, harmonious lives, to have lived in a former paradise as “noble savages.”21 Sweeney would go on to an illustrious career, with his final role as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he curated art of the Ancient Americas (see Koontz, this volume.) Other modernist curators were also some of ancient American art’s strongest champions. As Elizabeth Pope discusses in her essay on the Art Institute of Chicago, curator Katherine Kuh moved from organizing shows on José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) to collecting the ancient art that had inspired him and other Latin American artists.

By the 1930s, some US museums were codifying the concept of primitivism with the creation of curatorial departments that oversaw these culturally unaffiliated regions of Africa, Oceania, Ancient Americas (and sometimes including the addition of Native American art). The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection began as part of the Museum of Primitive Art (see Pillsbury, this volume), and both the Cleveland and Baltimore Museums of Art had departments known as “Primitive art” (see Bergh and Hoobler, this volume). And while they did not use the term “primitive” in their department names, the Brooklyn Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as many other US museums, used similar structures (see Rosoff and Pope, this volume).

Despite the increasing interest in ancient American art among the promoters of modernism, it never exactly epitomized what most considered primitive art. William Rubin, former director of MoMA and curator of celebrated and reviled exhibitions on this topic, felt that pre-Columbian art was more properly called “courtly” or “theocratic” art along the lines of ancient Egyptian and Persian art.22 According to Rubin, ancient American works’ odd position within primitivism was due to their naturalism, workmanship, and fine finish, particularly the Maya carved stone stelae, which exceeded what modern artists sought in primitive art.23 That is, although west Mexican ceramic figurines were embraced by artists in Mexico and the US, other art traditions in the Indigenous Americas, like Maya sculpture, were “too polished” for collectors of primitive art. Despite its uneasy status as primitive art—or maybe precisely because of it—many institutions, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and, surprisingly, the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, actively sought Maya stelae for their collections in the mid-twentieth century with an aim to present them precisely as exquisite examples of artistic and aesthetic achievement (see Bergh, Koontz, and Pillsbury, this volume).

Ancient Indigenous Motifs as Source for American Industrial Design

In fact, this aesthetic achievement was key to the collecting and acceptance of works from the Indigenous Americas from the late nineteenth to about the mid-twentieth centuries. The term “ancient American art” includes work from a huge geographic region, across thousands of years, and from numerous cultures. Some works, like west Mexican figures, were ceramics that did not seek to convey mimetic realism and whose details, to the modern eye, appear imprecise and broadly painted. However, many other art traditions, such as Colombian and Panamanian gold, Andean textiles, and Mixtec and Nasca ceramics, exemplify the highest virtuosity in their craftsmanship. Some of the earliest collections of ancient American art chronicled in this volume, including at The Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, were amassed with the idea that they would serve as sources of inspiration for US fashion, textile, and industrial design (see Pillsbury, Rosoff, and Hoobler, this volume).24 Herbert Spinden, the curator at the Brooklyn Museum, observed that national industrial design should “take its inspiration from the materials, designs, and craftsmanship of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and with which Americans could identify and be proud.”25 As Lauren Whitley has written, the conclusion of the First World War stimulated the interest in an American design identity independent from Europe, prompting scholars such as Morris de Camp Crawford to research museum collections and create the textile industry’s “Designed in America” campaign in conjunction with The Met, the American Museum of Natural History, and Women’s Wear publications. The campaign proved a training ground for young designers who took inspiration from ancient Americas textiles, among other cultural designs, housed at these institutions.26

Indigenismo in Latin America

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas became an inspiration to the newly minted republics across Latin America. As boundaries were redrawn and independent economies developed, the nascent formation of national identity and consciousness took place simultaneously. How to represent the nation on the world stage? How to reconcile the many communities living therein: Indigenous (Native ethnic groups), mestizos (mixed-race peoples), and criollos (mostly white descendants of Spanish colonists)? As the nineteenth century progressed, criollos across Latin America began to see the “Indian” as the “bedrock of a nation.”27 Art historian Natalia Majluf’s critical examination of Francisco Laso’s oeuvre, for example, demonstrates how Indigenous imagery became integral to the forging of a national identity rooted in the Indigenous communities of Peru, heirs to the ancient peoples of that land.28 Eventually, this focus on Indigenous peoples of Latin America evolved into indigenismo, an ideology that focused on “describing, explaining, and designing public policies for [Native] ethnic groups.”29 Indigenismo took many forms across the region, even within a single country.30 Sociopolitically, policies ranged from beneficial reforms promoting greater participation of Indigenous members to full-scale assimilation into a modernized society. Culturally, indigenismo valorized Indigenous artisans and their materials, techniques, and style. By celebrating and aestheticizing Indigenous-made objects and textiles, Latin American intellectuals and artists characterized these works as the singular legacy of the intellectual and technological achievements of the prehispanic peoples, giving visibility to oft-ignored communities.31

A single definition of indigenismo cannot be offered because its expression within sociopolitical and cultural realms diverged greatly. 32 Over the course of the next eight decades, this nuanced, and often fraught, ideology would undergo various evolutions, especially between 1920 and 1930 and again in the 1950s.33 Latin American artists would play a critical role in disseminating the perceived importance of ancient American culture within their own countries and transnationally, eventually making an impact on their northerly neighbor, the United States. The indigenismo that would be exported, however, would bring with it the many inherent contradictions and paradoxes that developed alongside it.

Following the Mexican Revolution, artists like Orozco, Diego Rivera (1886–1957), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) promoted Indigenous visual imagery from the ancient Americas as an integral part of Mexico’s national identity. Siqueiros memorialized this idea in his 1923 manifesto, asserting, “The art of the Mexican people is the most important and vital spiritual manifestation in the world today, and its Indian traditions lie at its very heart.”34 Similarly, Colombia’s Luis Alberto Acuña (1904–1994), who published the first monograph of Colombia’s “Indian” art, promoted a Native art history rooted in Colombia’s pre-Columbian past.35 Peru’s José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), founder and editor of the periodical Amauta, and his collaborator, artist José Sabogal (1880–1956), promoted Indigenous heritage as that which distinguished Latin America from Europe. When asked about his preference for Indigenous inspiration, Sabogal responded, “Why yes we are cultural indigenistas because we look for an integral identity with our soil, its humanity and our time.”36 Amauta, a Quechua word that translates to maestro or counselor, exemplifies Mariátegui’s privileging of the Indigenous perspective as he simultaneously forged a pan-American space for the avant-garde.37 Artists, poets, and intellectuals of the 1920s and ’30s mined the iconography and visual imagery of pre-Columbian cultures to depict the glories of their regional, ancient pasts and at the same time to signal their new nations’ unique modernity.

Despite its brief life (1926–30), Mariátegui’s journal presaged an interest in forging transnational connections.38 Politically, this was realized during the first Inter-American Conference on Indian Life, in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. Its principal objectives were “to comprehensively improve the life of the indigenous groups of America” and to “uphold and defend their cultural particularities.”39 At the conference, Mexico founded the Instituto Indigenista Inter-Americano (IIIA) and named Moisés Sáenz its inaugural director. Sáenz promoted cultural plurality and integration and advocated those representatives from Indigenous communities be present at the conference; however, after Sáenz’s sudden death, anthropologist Manuel Gamio replaced him. Gamio instituted an “apolitical and scientific” approach to indigenismo: in other words, a modern ethnography that excluded Indigenous voices from the conversation.40 Despite the desire to preserve and promote Indigenous culture as part of a modern, national dialogue, the actual material conditions of contemporary Indigenous communities did not see similar support and modernization.41 The IIIA would go on to found its own periodical, América Indígena, whose imagery and graphics would be foundational in creating an “an inter-American indigenist imaginary.”42 As anthropologist Deborah Dorotinsky has argued, the nature of the editorial design, logo, and the choice of illustrative woodprints created a certain uniformity in the depiction of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, counteracting the supposed objective of the larger indigenismo movements in both the political and cultural sphere.43 This would have ramifications in continental policies, and as other scholars have noted, this would influence the display and presentation of ancient American- and Indigenous-made art within the museum space.44

The embrace of Indigenous cultures by modern Latin American artists furthered the link between ancient American art and modernism. Not only did they adopt the visual vocabularies of the ancient past, but they also began collecting works for their own artistic inspiration and enjoyment. As works by the Mexican muralists became desirable for collectors and influential for the burgeoning abstract artists in the US during the mid-twentieth century, ancient American objects became even more attractive to collectors and institutions outside of Latin America.

Leading proponents of indigenismo such as Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957) would have an outsize influence on the presentation of ancient American material in the United States both through publications—content as well as editorial design—and in museum exhibitions such as Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at MoMA. They imparted their pride for the Indigenous-made materials of their homelands but conversely brought an idealized, and falsely homogenized, understanding of what Indigenous community life was like.45

The Rise of Pan-Americanism

The final development that influenced the popularization of ancient American art in US art collections was the political movement known as Pan-Americanism. The embrace of ancient American art by Latin Americans, and then by US artists, coincided with several geopolitical trends that turned the United States’ attention toward Latin America. Pan-Americanism saw two periods of popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, corresponding to greater US interest in strategic alliances with Latin America. The term was first used in reference to the independent nations of the Americas in the context of the First International American Conference of American States, held in Washington, DC, in 1889–90.46

Part of this first wave, which reached its apogee with the end of World War I, was an interest in Latin American antiquities. It encompassed the belief that the societies of ancient Latin America might offer a more peaceful and beautiful alternative to recent experience. British critic Roger Fry (cited above) championed this view, as well as art historian Walter Pach (1883–1958). One of the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, Pach was an important champion of Indigenous American art from the United States and particularly from south of the US border.47

Another important driver of this early version of Pan-Americanism and accompanying interest in the arts of the ancient Americas was a series of World’s Fairs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These represented opportunities for countries to share their visual culture with the public and with US museums, which sometimes bought or accepted examples of ancient American art at the conclusion of the fair. The fairs’ visitors experienced authentic works of art and material culture as well as replicas, such as the plaster casts of the Labná arch, a monumental Maya gateway from western Yucatan that was a star attraction at the 1893 Chicago World Columbian Exposition.48

But it is the Pan-Americanism that became politically, and later aesthetically, institutionalized in the 1930s through the 1950s that is much better known. Pan-Americanism intertwined with modern art by the early 1930s, as certain major exhibitions, notably MoMA’s 1933 American Sources of Modern Art, juxtaposed ancient and modern works to highlight formal and subject-matter similarities.49 Beginning in the 1930s, some US politicians began to cite an ideal of Pan-Americanism related to the unity of the nations of the Western hemisphere. In the same year as American Sources, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy espoused ideals of nonintervention and legal equality among these nations to promote cooperation.50

Even as many resisted accepting a broader hemispheric past or cultural unity, there were strategic interests at work. By the late 1930s, Mexico and Latin America were becoming of greater strategic importance as the winds of World War II began to blow. The Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), originally the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), was active between 1941 and 1946 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller (see Pillsbury, this volume). Rockefeller’s curator, René d’Harnoncourt, directed the Art Section of the CIAA and coordinated a large number of exhibitions that sought to show Latin American nations as worthy allies with sophisticated and intriguing cultures.51 These smaller Pan-American exhibitions contained folk art, modern art, even toys and utilitarian objects, but they often also included ancient art.

One of the most successful such exhibitions, much larger and more complex than the ones described above, was jointly organized between MoMA and the Mexican government—Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art in 1940. 52 As its title suggests, the show brought together art from four categories: pre-Spanish, colonial, folk, and modern art.53 It was co-organized by archaeologist Alfonso Caso (1896–1970) and the artist Covarrubias, whose illustrations, cartoons, and paintings of heroic Indigenous peoples of the Americas would fill popular books he authored on the subject.54 Both he and Roberto Montenegro (1887–1968), curator of the folk art section, frequently depicted and drew inspiration from ancient American art, which they also collected and occasionally sold.55 The exhibition was held at a nadir of US-Mexico relations in the wake of the expropriation of Mexico’s oil resources and played a key role in smoothing strained relations between the two nations. It also pointed to how Pan-Americanism could help with the commercialization of the ancient American past—the New York department store Macy’s sold works of modern art by Orozco and Siqueiros, as well as replicas of ancient Mexican gold, of the kind shown in the exhibition.56 They were, however, bested by Gimbel’s, a few blocks away, which sold actual ancient works from Peru in the same year.57

While Twenty Centuries marked a highwater mark of Pan-American exhibitions, it was far from the last. Shortly after, Herbert Spinden, of the Brooklyn Museum, embarked on a six-month speaking tour through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Spinden took the occasion to collect and accession about 1,400 objects from eight Latin American countries. Many of these were immediately included in the 1941–42 presentation America South of U.S. at the Brooklyn Museum, while others were included in six exhibitions that Brooklyn organized for the CIAA (three on ancient American themes and three on colonial and folk art). According to curator Diana Fane, “These exhibitions toured schools and public institutions throughout the United States for more than a decade starting in 1942.”58 While these exhibitions can be read as a barometer of the rising status of ancient American art within museums at the time, they also signal its falling. As the Brooklyn Museum’s Chief Curator Kevin Stayton mused about Spinden, “It’s not an accident that we sent an expedition in 1941. This was a last-ditch effort to weave together the Americas and ignore Europe during World War II, at a time we thought we could still get away with that. . . . And it is also no accident that the collection disappeared into our storerooms when achieving hemispheric unity receded in importance.”59

During 1944–45, Rockefeller sent d’Harnoncourt on a two-and-a-half-month tour of Latin America that included visits to Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil in order to “undertake a careful survey and prepare a report for this Office on propaganda activities being carried out by foreign powers in the other American republics.”60 The OIAA was concerned about developing trends and how best to prepare for the postwar political landscape. But by the 1950s, the US-Mexico relationship had irrevocably changed, and the spirit of Pan-Americanism began to wane. Postwar US power on the world stage had become great enough that it did not need to seek the same strategic, cultural alliances with Mexico that it once had. Interest in organizing international traveling exhibitions focused on the ancient Americas would diminish until the mid-1980s and ’90s, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) began to be drafted and ultimately passed, and major Latin American exhibitions were mounted with cooperation and support from nations of the region.

In response to the important trade relations in the American continent as well as the burgeoning Latine population in the United States, several notable large-scale exhibitions have resulted from international collaborations in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) stands out as having organized the lion’s share of exhibitions, including Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship (2006), Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico (2010–11), Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World (2011–12), Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico (2012), The Portable Universe: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (2022), and most recently, We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art (2024–25). Perhaps because of its position on the West Coast, a region, and specifically a city, with deep ties to Latin America, or because of the strength and vision of its curators—Virginia Fields (1989–2011), Ilona Katzew (2000–present), Diana Magaloni (2013–present)—or support by its director, Michael Govan (2006–present), LACMA-organized exhibitions challenged the field of Ancient Americas to grow beyond its original parameters. By far the most complex and ambitious exhibition of the ancient Americas to date was Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas (2017–18), a collaboration between the Getty Museum and The Met, curated by Joanne Pillsbury, Tim Potts, and Kim Richter, that involved numerous Latin American countries. Today, the ability to mount such ambitious international collaborations going forward is in doubt. The financial and diplomatic resources necessary for such undertakings are in increasingly short supply.

History of the Project

This volume arose from our own shared interest in the history of collections and a desire to understand the threads, both personal and historical, that connected institutions and collections to one another. As curators, we were interested in the modes of display and the interpretive frameworks applied to ancient material from Latin America. We asked ourselves why collections on the West Coast looked so different from those on the East Coast. What determined the nature and character of different institutional holdings?

Inspired by published histories on the development and representation of other “non-Western” collections that considered both the acquisition and display of Native American and African art, we sought a similar synthetic treatment for the ancient Americas.61 We found none. In 2017, no volume on the origins of ancient American art in US art museums existed. Interest in the connections between collections, museums, and diplomacy appear in Elizabeth Hill Boone’s edited volume, Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past (1993), specifically Holly Barnet-Sánchez’s pivotal essay on the 1940 exhibition at MoMA, and in Shelly Errington’s The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (1998). Errington addressed key periods of collecting and exhibition design, especially the impact of display techniques and the national rhetoric around pre-Columbian cultures and their political role for US-Latin American relations during the interwar and postwar periods.

We had each begun investigating specific collections and institutions and saw how the histories of these collections might be held as a mirror to broader institutional and regional histories. Our growing interest in the topic happily coincided with two key recent developments in pre-Columbian art history: the appointment of Mary Miller as director of the Getty Research Institute and her development of the Pre-Hispanic Provenance Initiative (PHAPI) and several art museums across the United States deciding to reinstall their ancient Americas collections.62 This confluence of events provided a moment to reflect and reconsider the institutional histories of these collections: both the lives and representations of objects as well as the ways in which these works have been used to represent Latin American national identity historically and the Latine communities’ growing interest in these collections.

In 2019, the Walters Art Museum invited a number of ancient Americas curators from US art museums, who were in different phases of reinstallation, to workshop ideas and/or report on their approaches. The success of those conversations resulted in the 2023 symposium at the Denver Art Museum. All symposium participants hold or have held positions in curatorial departments in the museums whose history they describe. Thus, their essays reflect both their knowledge of the field and their specific institutional experiences. The organization of the essays follows both a chronological and geographic arc beginning with Nancy Rosoff’s saga of the Brooklyn Museum’s diverse holdings and ending with Kristopher Driggers’s history of the Tucson Museum of Art’s collection. Mary Miller provides a coda of sorts, exploring the business ventures of gallerist Earl Stendahl and his family, which impacted so many of the collections discussed here. While not all of the most important collections of ancient American material in the United States are represented within this volume, including those at LACMA, the de Young Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art, the histories detailed here represent a substantial overview of the evolution of the field itself and collecting practices. Additionally, tracing the shifting position of the ancient Americas within US art museums offers crucial insights into museums’ own existential struggles as we come to terms with our colonial histories and make room for other perspectives and voices.

If museums are memory institutions, the keepers of national, cultural, and even global histories, curators are carriers of living memory for those institutions, communicating published and unspoken norms and standards that have shifted radically over the past few decades. In a specialty that has such a short history, retirement or death means the loss of ephemeral knowledge, memories about collection histories, donors, and the vicissitudes of institutional histories. The recent losses of pioneering curators Julie Jones at The Met, in 2021, and Diana Fane at the Brooklyn Museum, in 2024, made the need to capture the histories of these collections, remembered and known by the current generation of curators, all the more pressing. Jones began at the Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) in 1960 as an intern and was eventually promoted to curator in 1974. After the MPA collection was given to The Met, she stayed with the collection and shepherded its transition, overseeing the building and installation of the Rockefeller Wing, which opened in 1982. Fane was one of the first professionally trained curators in pre-Columbian art history, having received her doctorate from Columbia University. After working for three years at The Met with Jones, she began her career at the Brooklyn Museum in 1979 and served there twenty-one years before retiring. With their passing, the field has been deprived of a fuller accounting of their memories and wisdom and their perspective on the field’s origins and evolution. They were the last generation to have personal reminiscences of the field’s earliest influencers—the first professional scholars and dealers in this field, such as Gordon Ekholm, Junius Bird, and John Wise. This volume represents our attempt to reconstruct and preserve the memories of these collections and honor the work of those who came before us. May the book provide a pathway forward for the next generation.

Notes

  1. Until recently, the most important source for this area was the volume edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone, Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks 6–7 October 1990 (Dumbarton Oaks, 1993). Subsequently, there have been more publications in this vein, including Ellen Hoobler, “Smoothing the Path for Rough Stones: The Changing Role of Pre-Columbian Art in the Arensberg Collection,” in Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, and Ellen Hoobler, Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L. A. (Getty Research Institute, 2020), 342–98; Julie Jones, “Curiosités at Brummer’s,” in The Brummer Galleries, Paris and New York: Defining Taste from Antiquities to the Avant-Garde, Yaëlle Biro, Christine E. Brennan, and Christel H. Force, eds. (Brill, 2023), 299–316; Joanne Pillsbury, “The Panamerican: Nelson Rockefeller and the Art of Ancient Latin America,” in The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, Alisa LaGamma, Joanne Pillsbury, Eric Kjellgren, and Yaëlle Biro, eds. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 18–27; Joanne Pillsbury, “Recovering the Missing Chapters,” in Making the Met, 1870–2020, Andrea Bayer and Laura D. Corey, eds. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020), 209–15; Joanne Pillsbury, “Aztecs in the Empire City: ‘The People Without History’ in The Met,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 56 (2021): 12–31; and Andrew W. Turner and Megan E. O’Neil, eds., Collecting Mesoamerican Art Before 1940: A New World of Latin American Antiquities (Getty Research Institute, 2024). ↩︎

  2. Major collections not discussed in this book include those at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum (Massachusetts), de Young Museum in San Francisco, and others, in addition to numerous smaller museums that hold works, which are almost unknown to the public and understudied by academics because of the difficulty of accessing them. ↩︎

  3. Today, Mexican academics and institutions refer to contemporary Indigenous communities as pueblos originarios, or original peoples, a term akin Canada’s “First Nations.” For a longer discussion of the term, see Itzel Vargas Plata, “Los Huecos del agua: arte actual de los pueblos originarios,” in Los Huecos del agua: arte actual de los pueblos originarios (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021). Similarly, some American institutions have adopted the term “Ancestral Americas” to connect these collections to present-day peoples. See Diana Magaloni, Davide Dominici, and Alyce de Carteret, eds., We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books, 2024). The term “ancestral” blurs the temporal division that the term “ancient” underscores: the ancient past as separate from the present. Furthermore, it can serve as a more inclusive term that welcomes descendant communities on both sides of the border who cannot trace a direct line back to their Indigenous ancestors. ↩︎

  4. There have been previous attempts to consider the display of ancient American works in anthropology and university museums. See Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981) and Matthew Robb, “Lords of the Underworld—and of Sipán: Comments on the University Museum and the Study of Ancient American Art and Archaeology,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 1 (2019): 115–20. ↩︎

  5. Smithsonian Institution, “Art Museums and the Public,” October 2011, https://soar.si.edu/sites/default/files/reports/01.10.artpublic.final.pdf. For more on how museum formation and functions have changed over time, see Joni Boyd Acuff and Laura Evan, eds., Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2014); Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (University of California Press, 2008); Mike Murawski, Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021); Laura Raicovich, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso , 2021); and Charles Saumarez Smith, The Art Museum in Modern Times (Thames & Hudson, Inc., 2021). ↩︎

  6. Jens Andermann and Silke Arnold-de Simine, “Introduction: Memory, Community and the New Museum,” Theory, Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2012): 3–13. ↩︎

  7. James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997), 192. ↩︎

  8. Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (University of California Press, 1988), 5. ↩︎

  9. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 21. ↩︎

  10. Notably, the study of Afro-Latine and Asian Latine culture and cultural production in the colonial period stands outside of these categorizations. Museums such as The Met and the Baltimore Museum of Art, for example, continue to have these collections housed under a single departmental umbrella, but they maintain specialized curators. ↩︎

  11. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art, 49. ↩︎

  12. For more on this transformation see the accompanying exhibition catalogue by Arthur C. Danto, Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (Center for African Art, 1988). This transformation, even in 2024, is not a complete one. While many ancient American works are now in art museums, others remain in natural history or anthropological institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History (New York), National Museum of Natural History (Washington, DC), Field Museum (Chicago), and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, among others. ↩︎

  13. Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993). Latin American modernists, including the Mexican muralists, Joaquín Torres-García, Francisco Lazo, and others, were much more likely to look to ancestral sources rather than to African masks and objects for inspiration. ↩︎

  14. Both Hoobler and Pillsbury have mentioned the MFA, Boston, show as one of, if not the first, exhibition of this material framed as art in an American art museum. See Hoobler, “Smoothing the Path for Rough Stones” and Pillsbury, “Aztecs in the Empire City.” ↩︎

  15. A. M. T. [Alfred Marston Tozzer], “Exhibition of Maya Art,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 10, no. 56 (1912): 13–14. ↩︎

  16. Ibid., 14. ↩︎

  17. Max Weber, “Chac-Mool of Chichen-Itza,” in Cubist Poems (Elkin Mathews, 1914), 23–25. ↩︎

  18. Roger Fry, “Ancient American Art,” in Vision and Design (Chatto and Windus, 1920), 71. ↩︎

  19. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art, 70. ↩︎

  20. James Johnson Sweeney, African Negro Art (Museum of Modern Art, 1935), 11, cited in ibid., 92. An earlier exhibition, American Sources of Modern Art, held at MoMA in 1933, admitted on the first page of its catalog, “There is no intention here to insist that ancient American art is a major source of modern art. Nor it is intended to suggest that American artists should turn to it as the source of native expression.” Yet, the exhibition is filled with artists, including Mexican artists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros and US artists Max Weber and William Zorach, who had indeed “turned to” this art. Holger Cahill, American Sources of Modern Art (Museum of Modern Art, 1933), 5. ↩︎

  21. Errington covers this throughout her book, but she delves into it in the context of Sweeney. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art, 70–71. ↩︎

  22. William Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 1 (Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 3. ↩︎

  23. Ibid. ↩︎

  24. See, for example, Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1918 (Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press, 2013). Holger Cahill, curator of American Sources of Modern Art (see footnote 22) came from the Newark Museum of Art, founded by John Cotton Dana in 1909, who espoused a democratic approach to museology and art that became a defining quality of that institution, located in one of America’s foremost manufacturing cities. ↩︎

  25. Herbert Spinden, “As Revealed by Art,” quoted in Peggy Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiance: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (University of California Press, 2015), 177. ↩︎

  26. Lauren D. Whitley, “Morris De Camp Crawford and the ‘Designed in America’ Campaign, 1916–1922,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings (University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1998), https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1214&context=tsaconf. ↩︎

  27. Natalia Majluf, Inventing Indigenism: Francisco Laso’s Image of Modern Peru (University of Texas Press, 2021), 19 ↩︎

  28. Ibid. ↩︎

  29. Deborah Dorotinsky, “América Indígena and Inter-American Visual Indigenismo, 1941–1951,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 17, no. 4 (2022): 448. ↩︎

  30. Ibid., 449. ↩︎

  31. Ibid., 448. See also Mary R. Dickson, “Exhibiting Indigenismo: Identity Creation in the State-Organized Exhibitions of Post-Revolutionary Mexico” (master’s thesis, Pratt Institute, 2023), 1. ↩︎

  32. Maria Belausteguigoitia, “From Indigenismo to Zapatismo: Scenarios of Construction of the Indigenous Subject,” in Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and María Belausteguigoitia, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 23–36. ↩︎

  33. Ibid. ↩︎

  34. David Alfaro Siqueiros, quoted in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (Yale University Press, 1989), 324. ↩︎

  35. Luis Alberto Acuña, El arte de los indios colombianos (Ediciones Samper Ortega, 1942). ↩︎

  36. Alfonso Castrillón Vizcarra, quoted in Giovana Montenegro, “Indigenismo and Futurism in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui and the Peruvian Avant-garde,” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 7 (2017): 36n24. ↩︎

  37. Ibid., 36. ↩︎

  38. For more on the periodical, see Beverly Adams and Natalia Majluf, eds., The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico and Peru in the 1920s (Asociación Museo de Arte de Lima [MALI] and Blanton Museum of Art, 2019). ↩︎

  39. Laura Giraudo and Victoria Furio, “Neither ‘Scientific’ nor ‘Colonialist’: The Ambiguous Course of Inter-American ‘Indigenismo’ in the 1940s,” Latin American Perspectives 39, no. 5 (2012): 13. ↩︎

  40. Ibid., 15. ↩︎

  41. Ibid., 27. As Mary Dickson has aptly noted, this contradiction would be made visible in the presentation and displays of the National Museum of Anthropology’s collections, which presented the splendors of the ancient past on the first floor and contemporary material of Indigenous people on the second floor, entirely disconnected from the ground floor collections. Furthermore, the objects presented on the second floor were “employed as accessories for posed mannequins rather than singular objects presented for study or appreciation.” Dickson, “Exhibiting Indigenismo,” 35. ↩︎

  42. Dorotinsky, “América Indígena and Inter-American Visual Indigenismo,” 465. ↩︎

  43. Ibid., 466. ↩︎

  44. Ibid., 458. See also Harper Montgomery, “From Aesthetics to Work: Displaying Indian Labor as Modernist Form in Mexico City and New York,” Modernism/Modernity 21, no. 1 (2014): 231–51. ↩︎

  45. Dickson, “Exhibiting Indigenismo,” 30; Dorotinsky, “América Indígena and Inter-American Visual Indigenismo,” 466; Laura Giraudo and Emilio J. Gallardo-Saborido, “Staging inidanización/Staging Indigenismo: Artistic Expression, Representation of the ‘Indian’ and the Inter-American Indigenista Movement,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 17, no. 4 (2022): 392; Montgomery, “From Aesthetics to Work,” 244. ↩︎

  46. Joseph B. Lockey, “The Meaning of Pan-Americanism,” The American Journal of International Law 19, no. 1 (1925): 104. ↩︎

  47. Walter Pach, “The Greatest American Artists,” Harper’s Magazine 143 (January 1924): 252–62. ↩︎

  48. Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World, 33–34; Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (University of California Press, 1996), 185. For an image of the Labná arch on the causeway surrounded by other Maya architectural replicas, see The Werner Company, Ruins of Yucatan, World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 from the Field Museum (Illinois Digital Archives), accessed February 11, 2025, http://www.idaillinois.org/digital/collection/fmnh/id/313. ↩︎

  49. See “American Sources of Modern Art (Aztec, Mayan, Incan),” Museum of Modern Art, Exhibitions and Events, accessed February 11, 2025, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2932. ↩︎

  50. Holly Barnet-Sánchez has written cogently about the promise, reality, and perils of Pan-Americanism in the world of museums of the 1930s and ’40s. See Holly Barnet-Sánchez, “The Necessity of Pre-Columbian Art in the United States: Appropriations and Transformations of Heritage, 1933–1945,” in Boone, Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past, 177–208. ↩︎

  51. See Pillsbury, “The Panamerican”; Gisela Cramer and Usula Prutsch, ¡Américas unidas!: Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs, 1940-46 (Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert S.L. 2012); Claire Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Barnet-Sánchez, ibid.; Fabiana Serviddio, “Exhibiting Identity: Latin America Between the Imaginary and the Real,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 2 (2010): 481–98 ↩︎

  52. This exhibition has been interpreted extensively by, among others, Barnet-Sánchez, “The Necessity of Pre-Columbian Art in the United States”; Kathleen Berrin, Exhibiting the Foreign on U.S. Soil: American Art Museums and National Diplomacy Exhibitions Before, During, and After World War II (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 60–65; Megan E. O’Neil and Mary Ellen Miller, “An Artistic Discovery of America: Exhibiting and Collecting Mexican Pre-Hispanic Art in Los Angeles from 1940 to the 1960s,” in Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985, Wendy Kaplan, ed. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017), 162–67; Khristaan D. Villela, “Miguel Covarrubias and Twenty Centuries of Pre-Columbian Latin American Art, from the Olmec to the Inka,” in Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line, Carolyn Kastner, ed. (The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and University of Texas Press, 2014), 49–75; Ellen Hoobler, “An ‘Artistic Discovery’ of Antiquity: Alfonso Caso, the Archaeologist as Curator at the New York World’s Fair and MoMA’s Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, 1939–1940,” in Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives, Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler, eds. (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 119–34. ↩︎

  53. To see installation photographs, various publications, and press releases, see “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art,” Museum of Modern Art, Exhibitions and Events, accessed February 11, 2025, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2985. ↩︎

  54. Covarrubias envisioned a triumvirate of books, of which he completed two, published by Alfred A. Knopf: The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent: Indian Art of the Americas: North America: Alaska, Canada, and the United States (1954) and Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (1957). ↩︎

  55. Ellen Hoobler, “Animateurs Across Borders: Essential Interlocutors Within the Midcentury System of Dealing in Ancient American Art,” in Collecting Mesoamerican Art, 1940–1968: Forging a Market in the United States and Mexico (Getty Research Institute, forthcoming 2025). ↩︎

  56. Hoobler, “An ‘Artistic Discovery’ of Antiquity,” 131, 133. ↩︎

  57. Gimbel’s ad, The New York Times, January 14, 1942, p. 9. ↩︎

  58. Diana Fane, “From Precolumbian to Modern: Latin American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 1930-50,” in Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Latin America, Diana Fane, ed. (Brooklyn Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 16–17. ↩︎

  59. Kevin Stayton, quoted in Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances, 74. ↩︎

  60. Nelson A. Rockefeller to Rene d’Harnoncourt, September 29, 1944, Record group: III 4 L, Box 135, Folder 1325, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY. ↩︎

  61. Janet Catherine Berlo, ed., The Early Years of Native American Art History (University of Washington Press, 1992); Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke, eds., Representing African Art in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (University of Washington Press, 2011). ↩︎

  62. The Art Institute of Chicago and Cleveland Museum of Art opened their reinstalled galleries in 2011 and 2017, respectively. The Dallas Museum of Art (2023), Denver Art Museum (2021), Brooklyn Museum (2024), LACMA (2026), The Met (2025), Tucson Museum of Art (2022), and the Walters (2025) also all reinstalled their permanent collection galleries of ancient American art. ↩︎