The Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains exhibition provides us with a wonderful opportunity to showcase the Museum’s Native American collections and resources. As someone who has studied Native American art and whose Grandmother was Native American, I am very proud to be working in an institution that has extensive collections documenting the cultural heritage of Native America.
Native American art and culture has been an area of keen interest for this institution dating to the 1820’s with the Brooklyn Apprentices Library, the predecessor of the Brooklyn Museum. As this institution evolved from a library into a museum, plans were laid to develop an encyclopedic collection representing art and culture from around the world to be viewed by the citizens of Brooklyn and other local, national and international visitors. 1903 marked a new era for this institution with the establishment of a Department of Ethnology for “building up great ethnological collections, sending out expeditions for the acquiring of antiquities, first over all America, then over the entire world.”
Stewart Culin was hired as the first Curator of Ethnology and he quickly began to acquire collections representing Native American as well as African, Oceanic and Asian art and cultures. Culin worked alongside William Henry Goodyear, first Curator of Fine Arts, and Susan Hutchinson, founding Museum Librarian. The acquisitive force of these three long time Museum employees laid the foundation of the collections under the care of the Museum today.
Also on view in the Library Display cases located on the second floor of the Museum, we are showcasing a set of newly scanned images from the lantern slide collection. In addition, you’ll find several rare items related to the Tipi exhibition there including a set of silk-screened images of painted tipis.
We also have many books on tipis available in the Library, so come visit and learn more about Native American culture!
Deirdre Lawrence has been the Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum since late 1983. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was Associate Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her M. L. S. from Pratt Institute in 1979 and has studied art history on the graduate level. At the Brooklyn Museum she has established the Museum Archives and implemented many projects to preserve and make accessible the research collections. Deirdre has overseen a major renovation project, implementation of an online catalog and several collaborative projects with other libraries. She has written articles on the collections and lectured frequently on the research collections held in the Libraries and Archives as well as Brooklyn Museum history. Deirdre has curated several exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science and serves as a board member at the Center for Book Arts in New York.