The First Art of the First Americans at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, collected hardly any Native American objects until Nelson Rockefeller’s massive donation in 1969, which established the museum’s first department for the arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Through a detailed review of its early history, this article seeks to demonstrate that there was much more Native American art at the Met, that it was present earlier than most people know, and that it was more important to the institution’s initial pattern of collecting than we have been led to believe. At the same time, it discusses how the fate of American Indian art at the Met has been various and contested, owing to shifts in museum leadership, department structures, disciplinary tensions, object reclassifications, and external politics.