The Collection: Riches, Rivals, and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America

1. The Collection Riches, Rivals, and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America

2. Collector’s “Passion” • Obsessive and self-sacrificing • Ego-driven and visionary • “Competitive, even ruthless” • Generous, often wealthy

3. Botany curator Alice Eastwood, who saved California Academy of Sciences botanical collection after 1906 earthquake fire.

4. California Historical Societycaliforniahistoricalsociety.org/about • In June 1871 a group of people assembled at 323 California Street, marking the first of four attempts to begin the California Historical Society (CHS). After the undocumented collapse of the first group, a second attempt to revive CHS lasted from 1886 to1891. In 1902 the ailing Society partnered with the California Genealogical Society and for a brief period the collaboration prospered. The earthquake and fire damage of 1906 induced yet another break of CHS. • Finally in 1922 C. Templeton Crocker, grandson of Charles Crocker, permanently resurrected the Society. Also that year, Crocker placed at CHS his fine collection of Californiana, rivaling those of Hubert Howe Bancroft* and Henry E. Huntington*. His financial generosity supported CHS until the dues collected enabled the organization to hire its first staff member in March 1923. The group held its first exhibition at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco in 1924. (*Bancroft Library UC Berkeley; *Huntington collection Los Angeles) • CHS's initial purpose was the publication of a quarterly journal, which it has produced since 1922. Two decades later, Crocker permanently donated his collection to CHS, which still continues to form the foundation of the North Baker Research Library and the Fine Arts collection today.

5. Competition, Egos, Public Gifts Bancroft Library Huntington Library

6. Wealthy Collector  Donors • Payne Aldrich Tariff Act 1909: art duty-free • “Civic pride and reputation” 1920s • Andrew Mellon’s gift--National Gallery of Art: mitigate personal income tax scandal • Wealthy visionaries: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Peggy Guggenheim

7. Collectors, Patrons, Visionaries, Friends to Artists, and ”Influencers” Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Robert Henri Peggy Guggenheim Berenice Abbott

8. Collecting Trends: 1920s+ • Contemporary European Art • American Art (John Cotton Dana) • Photography (Alfred Stieglitz) • Native American pottery and beadwork

9. New Ideas: What to Collect John Cotton Dana: Museums for the People Alfred Stieglitz: Photography as an Art Form

10. Genocide, land grabs, and boarding schools enable this new culture of collecting. “…at the same time that ...collectors were in search of the ‘most authentic’ or oldest types of tribal artifacts for their collections, Native communities were experiencing pressures to assimliate into American society—to give up the very ways of life that produced these objects and that the objects reflect.” Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (10-11)

11. Collecting Trends: 1930s • The latest machines, film, handmade Americana crafts, dinosaur bones • Botanical gardens, zoos, natural history museums • Problem with “social Darwinism” and myth of “superior civilizations”

12. The Field Museum in Chicago Moves Forward, they say…

13. World War II and Post War • Nazi-looted art from museums and Jewish collectors (documented in Women In Gold and Monuments Men films and The Rape of Europa by Lynn Nicholas ) • Post war boom economy middle class collectors • Long-standing problems: unclear provenance and lack of conservation

14. New Museum Professions • Conservators--”art of restoration” becomes “science of conservation” (bring work back to original condition) • Registrars—tracking and documenting condition and provenance

15. Scandals in Museum World • Deccessioning practices revealed in 1960s and 70s and posing a continuing problem • Looting of antiquities leading to “ethics of acquisition” (Greece, Rome, Africa, Latin America)

16. Responses to Illicit Trafficking • UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 1970 Convention on the Means and Preventing the Ilicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property • ICOM (International Council on Museums) ongoing concern and support for “ethics of acquisition” policies • International Congress of Americanists1968 resolution condemning looting of pre-Columbian antiquities

17. Antiquities Returned Stolen Artifacts from Nigeria returned by MFA Boston Stolen Artifacts from Greece returned by Austria

18. Responses to Political Movements 1970s+ • Research and repatriation of stolen objects including 1990 NAGPRA Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act • Establishment museums exhibitions more respectful of people of color and working classes plus documentation of racism and other systematic brutalities • Rise of“ethnic,” tribal, LGBT, and women’s museums

19. Identity museums respond to social movements. Studio Museum of Harlem GLBT Historical Society San Francisco

20. Non-Collecting Museums • Science Centers • Children’s and Youth Museums • Interactivity and Community Engagement