Diana Fane Books

The Brooklyn Museum has played a major role in presenting and interpreting North American Native art. Its commitment to this field began in 1903, when R. Stewart Culin was appointed to head its new Department of Ethnology. During three trips to the Northwest in 1905, 1908, and 1911, Culin collaborated with Dr. Charles F. Newcombe and bought several pieces from Newcombe's own collection, including objects from the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Salish as well as some Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Athapaskan pieces. By 1912 the museum's collection included more than 9,000 pieces. Objects of Myth and Memory is the first publication devoted to this fascinating and influential early collection. It includes two interpretive essays on Culin's career as well as 250 individual entries which illustrate and annotate his most important acquisitions. A visually stunning book, Objects of Myth and Memory presents masterworks of North American Indian art in a precise social and historical context and offers fascinating glimpses of the collecting process.

This beautiful catalog presents the first systematic study of feather mosaics from New Spain in the context of a broader creative exchange between Mesoamerican and European aesthetics and materials. Thirty-three scholars look at these unprecedented artworks that circulated in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries from a range of vantage points, including art history, anthropology, collecting, natural history, archeology, and conservation. Published to complement a major international exhibition held at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City in 2011, the book is organized thematically and includes over three hundred color photographs of feather mosaics with astonishing detail, as well as relevant paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, books, European illuminated manuscripts, Mesoamerican codices, and studies of natural history. No book has ever brought together so many images of artworks from this tradition, let alone assembled a team of scholars to offer such trenchant analysis. It will be essential for art historians, scholars of colonialism, and historians of the Spanish Empire alike.