Magazines - Tribal Art Spring 2009

By Elaine Sooy Goodman

Introduction
In 1964, while the Civil Rights Movement was enduring its major birth pangs, Warren M. Robbins founded the Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, as an effort toward communication between cultures. Originally located in the Capitol Hill townhouse once occupied by the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, the museum became part of the Smithsonian Institution and, in 1987, moved to half of a new $75 million complex on the Federal Mall, sharing the largely underground facility conceived by Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Asian art. The National Museum of African Art, as it became known, was already a unique gem in the Smithsonian’s crown when director Sharon Patton expanded the collection to world-class level with the acquisition of the Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection from the Walt Disney Company in 2005. Begun as a small, private educational institution with an art museum attached, the National Museum of African Art has taken a place among the world’s finest museums of traditional African art.
Robbins was a white Jewish atheist from Worchester, Massachusetts. Neither an artist nor an expert in art history, when he founded the museum he had never been to Africa. He had studied English, history, cultural anthropology, and general semantics, and had earned a master’s degree from the University of Michigan. He had piloted small planes, written an aviation column for a small newspaper, and been a high school teacher at a private school on the New Hampshire coast. After teaching one year at an American school in Germany, he joined the Foreign Service in 1951. Within ten years he was Director of American Cultural Programs for West Germany in Bonn.