American Indian museum a Manhattan attraction

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Visitors to the Big Apple can take an hour or an afternoon away from the big city and spend a little time at the Heye Centre of the National Museum of the American Indian, without leaving town. Located at the tip of Battery Park in lower Manhattan, the museum features changing exhibitions and public educational sessions, as well as a permanent orientation exhibition, all designed to explore and explain Native American culture.

Opened in the fall of 1994, the museum is "an institution of living cultures dedicated to the preservation, study and exhibition of the life, languages, literature, history and arts of the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere." Housed on two floors of the historic Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at One Bowling Green, the museum's exhibition and public-access areas total approximately 1,800 sq. m.

A beaux-arts-style building designed by famed architect Cass Gilbert and completed in 1907, the custom house is a designated National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.

Two of the three inaugural exhibits are still open. Visitors can still see "All Roads Are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture" and "Creation's Journey: Masterworks of Native American Identity and Belief."

There are two newly opened exhibitions: "Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans" and "Ancestral Memories: A Tribute to Native American Survival." There are daily and specially scheduled programs for both adults and children designed to complement the new exhibitions. Admission is free, and the latest public information is available over the phone at (212) 825-6922.

The museum has a collection of over one million objects and some 86,000 prints and negatives, mostly collected by George Gustav Heye. The Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian opened to the public in 1922 in New York City. Most items are stored at the museum's research annex in the Bronx.

Included in the colection are fine wood, stone and horn carvings from the Northwest; Navajo weavings and blankets; Caribbean archeological objects; Peruvian and Mexican textiles; Southwestern basketry; Colombian, Mexican and Peruvian gold work; Olmec and Mayan jade; Aztec mosaics; and Plains painted hides and garments. Sixty-seven per cent of the collection comes from the U.S., three per cent from Canada, the balance from Central and South America.