Dockstader, Frederick J.

Frederick J. Dockstader (1919-1998) was an art consultant, museum director, and silversmith from New York, N.Y.

Art consultant, museum director, silversmith; New York, N.Y. Born 1919.

Dr. Frederick Dockstader (1919-1928) anthropologist, art professor, museum director, and noted authority on American Indian art, was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1919. However he spent much of his youth on the Hopi and Navajo reservations in Arizona. During this period he became an accomplished silversmith and started his lifelong interest in studying indigenous peoples and their art. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from Arizona State College, Flagstaff, Arizona. After a short stint teaching in the Flagstaff public schools he went on to Western Reserve University, where he received his Ph.D in 1951.

Dockstader went on to an impressive career in the museum world. He became the Staff Ethnologist at the Cranbook Institute of Science from 1950-1952; Curator of Anthropology at Dartmouth College Museum, 1952-1955; Assistant Director at the Museum of the American Indian, 1955-1960; and Director at the Museum of the American Indian, 1960-1975. Dockstader served as a Commissioner and as Chairman of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Indian Arts and Crafts Board, and a member of the New York State Museum Advisory Council. Dockstader also taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and Arizona State University.

Dockstader is widely published in the area of Indian Art. His books include The Kachina and the White Man: a Study of the Influences of White Culture on the Hopi Kachina Cult (1954), Indian Art in America (1962), Indian Art in Middle America (1964), Indian Art in South America (1967), and Great American Indians (1977).