Museum of Primitive Art (New York, N.Y.)

The Museum of Primitive Art (MPA), New York, was the first art museum in the United States founded specifically to exhibit the traditional arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native and Precolumbian America. Formerly located at 13 and 15 West 54 Street, the museum was open to the public from 1957 to 1974, after which it became part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Museum of Primitive Art played a significant role in the development of audiences, appreciation, education, and understanding of non-European sculpture through innovative exhibitions and publications.

The Museum of Primitive Art was founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller in association with René d'Harnoncourt, then President of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rockefeller was a long-time collector and patron of the arts in addition to serving as governor of New York from 1959-1973 and Vice-President of the United States from 1974 to 1977.

The museum was chartered on Dec. 17, 1954, as the Museum of Indigenous Art. However, this term was not then widely understood by the public, and on Dec. 21, 1956, the charter was amended and the name changed to the Museum of Primitive Art. The museum opened to the public on Feb. 21, 1957, presenting the first of eighty-five exhibitions.

The first director of the MPA, appointed in 1956, was art historian Robert Goldwater, who was a scholar both of non-European, modern European and American art. After his death in 1973, the museum's curator, Douglas Newton, an expert on the arts of the Pacific, was named its second and last director in Jan. 1974.

In 1969, after the Museum of Primitive Art's collection had grown substantially, Nelson Rockefeller offered the entire collection of the MPA to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a separate department for the care, study, and exhibition of the works and study materials was established. With that agreement, the process of planning and building a new wing and transferring the collections to the Metropolitan Museum began.

The last exhibition at the Museum of Primitive Art ended in Dec. 1974 and the MPA closed its door to the public on Jan. 1, 1975. The Museum of Primitive Art began its transition that continued until its Board of Trustees officially dissolved it in 1978. That year the former MPA collection was accessioned by the Metropolitan Museum. After Nelson Rockefeller's death in 1979, his collection came to the Metropolitan by bequest the same year. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum, which opened to the public in Jan. 1982, included objects from these collections and others now on display.