87 FIG. 11: Headdress: female bust, d’mba. Baga peoples, Niger River region, Guinea. 19th–20th century. Wood. H: 118.1 cm. The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979. 1979.206.17. America for information and expertise4 and widened the network of vendors the MPA purchased from. His tenure led to the acquisition of many works still considered today as the most epic creations of their genre. In the spring 1957 inaugural exhibition, Goldwater underscored “We are aware of our kinship with all mankind.”5 This humanist approach to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas informed the some seventy subsequent exhibitions organized by the MPA and its nearly sixty publications. The museum itself was pocketsized, but the effect its exhibition program had on non- Western art museography, collectors, and the public was tremendous. The exhibitions varied from selections of recent acquisitions in all the areas encompassed by the museum to works on loan from local collectors to focused FIG. 12: Page from curator Douglas Newton's MPA Exhibition Sketchbook dedicated to the exhibition Senufo Sculpture from West Africa, p. 221. AR.1999.18.197. The Museum of Primitive Art Records, Visual Resource Archive, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. thematic installations. Those exhibitions that investigated every aesthetic aspect of a specific culture, such as the 1960 Bambara Sculpture from the Western Sudan, 1963 Senufo Sculpture from West Africa,6 and 1965 The Jaguar’s Children: Pre-Classic Central Mexico, were to have an especially enduring impact (fig. 12). NOTES 1. Ezra, Kate. “Collecting African Art at New York’s Museum of Primitive Art.” In Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke (eds.). Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 2011, pp. 122–149. 2. Ezra, op. cit, p. 125. 3. Ezra, op. cit. p. 131. 4. Delange, Jacqueline. “Robert Goldwater and the African Object.” In Robert Goldwater: A Memorial Exhibition. New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1973, p. 20. 5. The Museum of Primitive Art. Selected Works from the Collection. Spring 1957. 6. Gagliardi, Susan Elizabeth. “Senufo Sculpture from West Africa: an influential exhibition at The Museum of Primitive Art, New York, 1963.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/smpa/hd_smpa.htm (January 2010)
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