Help us celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation (NMAI's predecessor institution) by transcribing the museum's history. "George Heye Correspondence, A-B, 1936-1955," (Box 1, Folder 2) from the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation Records documents the early collecting practices of the MAI-Heye Foundation under founding Director George Gustav Heye.
Help us celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation (NMAI's predecessor institution) by transcribing the museum's history. "George Heye Correspondence, A-B, 1936-1955," (Box 1, Folder 2) from the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation Records documents the early collecting practices of the MAI-Heye Foundation under founding Director George Gustav Heye.
On May 10, 1916, George Heye--along with trustees F. Kingsbury Curtis, Frederick K. Seward, and William Lare--signed a foundation deed creating the MAI as an institution for "the collection, preservation, study and exhibition of all things connected with the anthropology of the aboriginal people of North, South and Central Americas, and containing objects of artistic, historic, literary and scientific interest." The basis of the MAI's collection was the approximately 175,000 objects already assembled by George Heye and informally referred to as the Heye Museum.
George Heye had begun collecting Native American objects in 1897. By 1904 he became serious about founding his own museum, devoting much of his time to acquiring and cataloging large collections. As early as December 1905, Heye sought support to found an institution with two facilities--one for exhibitions and one for storage, with research space for students. His motivation for collecting was not solely to amass a large private collection but to create an institution for the serious study of the people of the Americas. In the decade between his first conversations about building a museum and laying the foundation stone 1916, Heye was able to generate support for his vision of a new anthropological institution in New York. In 1922, the Museum of the American Indian finally opened to the public at 155th and Broadway in New York. By 1990, when the MAI became part of the Smithsonian Institution, the collection included more than 800,000 objects, the great majority acquired during George Heye's lifetime.
