I later reported you about the other places that I had visited during that trip, but never mentioned my first stop, where I was on a top-secret(!) mission for the Wall Street Journal.
Tomorrow my article on the new American Indian galleries at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City will at last appear. (Sometimes the wheels of the printing presses grind slowly.)
So why did I highlight that object, which is not American Indian but American colonial? The small silver gorget, ca. 1756, by Philadelphian William Hollingshead is the transitional object between the Nelson-Atkins’ newly refurbished and reinstalled American art galleries and its even more recent American Indian galleries, which opened in November.
Ornaments such as the engraved image of he sun, above, were worn around the neck. They were presented as diplomatic gifts to the Indians by the American colonists—making it an apt lynchpin between the two cultures and the two installations.
It was director Marc Wilson‘s strong conviction that the art of the first Americans needed to be shown contiguously with and on equal footing with the works of better known American artists like Copley, Sargent, Church, Bingham and Benton. In curator Gaylord Torrence, the museum’s inaugural head of its new American Indian department, he found a willing and exceptionally able co-conspirator.
I’ll provide a link to the piece when it’s up tonight.