Back to the Future: Reflections on Exhibiting American Indian Art and Artifact in the United States
Reflecting on changes in the collections and exhibitions of Amerindian fine art objects and artifacts in the United States since the 19th century, the author outlines the principal transformations in the way ethnographic collections have been categorized and displayed. In the 19th century, the mania for order led curators to organize collections based on form and function. However, in the early 20th century, under the influence of Franz Boas, geography and cultural histories were increasingly used to categorize objects and build new typologies. In museology, this new approach found expression in dioramas that aimed to reconstitute an aspect of the traditional lifestyle of a particular group. More recently, American museums have had a strong tendency to aestheticize Amerindian artifacts, focusing on their qualities as fine art, while Amerindians have focused instead on the “heritage value” of objects repatriated from State museums.