Brooklyn Museum. Department of the Arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas.

The Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences created the Department of the Arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas (AAPA) in 1903. The early collections of the Department were obtained primarily through the museum expeditions conducted by the first curator of ethnology Stewart Culin. After Culin's death in 1929, Herbert J. Spinden was appointed curator and, concurrently, head of the Education Department. Spinden aggressively promoted the role of the Museum in the field of education and successfully extended the department's activities into the New York Public school system through lectures and loan exhibitions. He continued to enrich the Museum's North American holdings by arranging to borrow and later acquire in 1950 the New-York Historical Society's Nathan Sturgis Jarvis Collection of Native American Art from the Eastern Plains. The department also purchased important Peruvian textiles from the Paracas Necropolis in the 1930s, including the Paracas textile [38.121].

Herbert Spinden retired at the end of 1950 and Frederick R. Pleasants was named his successor. As assistant curator, Pleasants had reorganized the African Gallery and began a reinstallation of pre-Columbian objects. As curator, he reemphasized the Native American collections and organized several important exhibitions. In 1958, Jane Powell Rosenthal supervised the rebuilding of the African installation and part of the North American Indian Gallery. In 1960, the department purchased one of its most significant objects, the African "Royal Portrait of Bom Bosh," along with sculpture from the Sepik River area in New Guinea and 33 objects of Dutch New Guinea art. A few years later it obtained the Mujica collection of ancient Peruvian gold and staged the exhibition "Gold of the Andes" (1963).

...