George Gustav Heye

Thea and George Heye digging in Arizona (2nd and 7th from left). From 1917 to 1923, the Zuni village of Hawikkku was investigated there under the direction of Frederick Webb Hodge (6th from left) .

Heye next to Elsie Copper and her brother, who belong to the Saanich near Victoria in southwestern Canada , 1938. Heye worked with the collector Charles F. Newcombe , who drew numerous works from the northwest.

George Gustav Heye ( 1874 - January 20, 1957 ) was a collector of artifacts from American Indians . His collection became the core of the National Museum of the American Indian .

Life

George Gustav Heye was born to Carl Friederich Gustav Heye and Marie Antoinette Lawrence from Hudson ; his father was a German immigrant who had made a fortune in the oil industry. George studied at what was then Columbia College in New York, now Columbia University , and graduated as an electrical engineer in 1896. From 1901 to 1909 he worked in investment banking .

In 1897 he came into contact with indigenous culture as a collector for the first time when he bought a Navajo deer skin shirt. Until 1903 he acquired further unique pieces, in order to acquire from then on on a large scale. In 1915 he worked with Frederick W. Hodge and George H. Pepper at Nacoochee Mound in White County in the state of Georgia. Her work was funded by the Heye Foundation and the Bureau of American Ethnology and was considered one of the best-documented excavations of its time. In 1918 the excavators published their report under the title The Nacoochee Mound In Georgia .

Heye amassed one of the largest private collections of indigenous art. At first he collected the objects in his apartment on Madison Avenue in New York , but he soon had to rent space. From 1908 he referred to his collection with the designation "The Heye Museum", and he soon loaned individual objects to the later University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia . In 1916 he bought JE Standley's collection of Alaskan artifacts from the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in Seattle .

The Heye collection has now been relocated to the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian at 155th Street and Broadway; the museum opened in 1922 after six years. Heye himself was its first director until 1956. It soon contained more than a million objects, some of which he bought at European auctions. From 1919 he brought out the journal Indian Notes and Monographs . In 1994 the Smithsonian Institution took over the house and opened the Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in the former Alexander Hamilton US Custom House on Manhattan .

Heye was a member of the American Anthropological Association and the American Museum of Natural History , he was also a Fellow of the American Geographical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science , and an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in Great Britain. In 1929 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg . From the Iroquois Seneca he was given the honorary name "O'owah" (screeching owls | screeching owl), the Hidatsa from North Dakota gave him the name "Isatsigibis" (slim shin) in 1938. The Hidatsa believed that a medicine bag stolen by a missionary in Heye's collection was the cause of the great drought of those years. They therefore requested the return. Heye gave the bag to the 84-year-old Foolish Bear and the 75-year-old Drags Wolf.

Works

• George G. Heye, Frederick W. Hodge, George H. Pepper: The Nacoochee Mound in Georgia , New York 1918.

Web links

Commons : George Gustav Heye  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Biography on the Smithsonian Institution website (PDF; 41 kB)

Remarks

1. ↑ online