Department of Ancient Art Records

As the William Rockhill Nelson trustees began to acquire art in 1930 in preparation for opening the museum, they arranged with Harold Woodbury Parsons to act as their art advisor and agent for ancient art, along with European and American art. When the museum’s former registrar, Ross Taggart, was named Senior Curator in 1953, he became the first individual to manage the museum’s collection of ancient art along with his other new duties overseeing the museum’s decorative art and American art collections. When Taggart retired in 1983, Joseph Kuntz, the Associate Curator in Charge of Medieval and European Decorative Arts, took over the role of overseeing these collections. However, after Kuntz’s untimely death in 1985, the museum worked to formally hire a curator who would specifically manage the collection of ancient art objects. That same year, Dr. Robert Cohon, a specialist in Greek and Roman art, was officially hired to become the museum’s Assistant Curator of Arts of the Ancient World. In conjunction with this new role, Cohon also assumed a part-time teaching position with the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC).

One of Cohon’s first major undertakings with the museum was an overhaul of the way the ancient art collections were presented in the gallery spaces, which led to a restructuring of the galleries so that each room was dedicated to one culture. He also worked with scholars to identify and remove copies and forgeries in the ancient collection and brought several sculptures out from storage to display.

Over the course of Cohon’s tenure, many high-traffic and nationally-acclaimed exhibitions were carried out in the department. Cohon curated the traveling exhibition, Discovery and Deceit: Archaeology and the Forger’s Craft (10/11/1996 - 1/5/1997) and Gold of the Nomads: Scythian Treasures from Ancient Ukraine (6/8 - 8/8/2001). Additionally, Cohon oversaw the arrival and installation of Echoes of Eternity: The Egyptian Mummy and the Afterlife (6/4/1999 - 5/7/2000) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), which included a mummy and coffin, CAT scans, canopic jars, and funerary figurines. He also worked to bring Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art from the British Museum (4/12 – 7/7/2002) to the museum, which, with programming, attracted over 100, 000 visitors and at the time was one of the three largest and most complex exhibitions that the museum had ever displayed.

The success of these shows led Cohon to search for a mummy to boost the museum’s own existing Egyptian collection. In 2004, the museum obtained a late first millennium B.C. mummy which was named “Mummy of Ka-i-Nefer.” That same year, Cohon announced that the museum had been offered a fourth-century funerary collection of an Egyptian noblewoman named Mertites. In 2007, the museum finally purchased the 2,300-year-old collection of funerary objects which included a seven-foot-tall gilt sarcophagus – all of which became the highlight of the newly renovated Ancient Art and Egyptian gallery spaces in 2010.

Cohon retired from his role as Curator, Arts of the Ancient World in August of 2018.