American Indian museum a Manhattan attraction

United States

Guide to Indian Country Page 28

Visitors to the Big Apple can take an hour or an afternoon away from

the big city and spend a little tome 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 art 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 collection are fine wood, stone and horn carvings from

the Northwest; Navajo weavings and blankets; Caribbean archeological

objects; Peruvian and Mexican textiles; Southwestern basketry;

Columbian, 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.