Department of American Indian Art Records

The Department of American Indian Art had its beginnings at the museum with works acquired in 1933 from the Fred Harvey Company in Kansas City and the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation in New York (now the National Museum of the American Indian). In the museum’s 1957 Annual Report, the department is first mentioned as the “Department of Native Arts” however, after the departure of the department’s assistant curator G.F. (Franklin) Crabtree in 1964, it became more generally referred to as “Primitive Arts” under the watch of Ralph T. Coe. Coe’s 1977 exhibition, Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Indian Art, boosted the Museum’s attendance to the second highest level in its history. For many years, the museum’s American Indian collections were grouped together with the Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AOA) until a decision was made in the early 2000s to divide it into two separate departments.

In 2001, a gift of 170 objects from Donald D. Jones was made to the newly named Department of American Indian Art with Gaylord Torrence joining the museum the following year as the founding Fred and Virginia Merrill Curator of American Indian Art. These gifts along with additional funding and Torrence’s direct expertise in the field led to a rapid growth of the museum’s American Indian art collection and called for multiple gallery reinstallations and expansions during the mid to late 2000s.