The arts of the ancient Americas at the Dallas Museum of Art

Indigenous American art has a long history at the Dallas Museum of Art. The DMA, formerly the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (DMFA), first acquired early twentieth-century paintings and watercolors on paper by Indigenous North American artists in 1933. These works depicted Indigenous life and ceremonies. In 1950, human and animal ceramic effigies from Nicaragua were added, followed by two Chimú featherworks, several other pieces of ancient Andean pottery, Veracruz ceramics, and contemporary Inuit soapstone sculptures. These eclectic beginnings set the foundation for a collection that to date totals some 3,615 works of art and cultural significance and composes nearly 15 percent of the DMA's total collection. Created by Indigenous peoples from Alaska to the Andes, and with over 145 distinct cultural groups represented, the large number of objects in the collection by no means implies exhaustive coverage of the artistic accomplishments of peoples across the great geographic and socio-politically diverse expanse of the Americas. The artworks span nearly 4,500 years; the oldest artifacts in the collection are small human figurines attributed to the so-called prehistoric Valdivia culture that occupied the Pacific coastal lowlands of Ecuador from approximately 3500-1500 BCE. The DMA holds multiple works ascribed to Valdivia. The most recently created work is Multiplicity (2019), a striking gourd-shaped ceramic vessel portraying a futuristic narrative by Cochiti Pueblo artist Diego Romero. While the works in the Indigenous American collection include both ancient and contemporary examples, ancient and ancestral works predominate and are the focus of this catalogue--