Museums - Nordamerika Native Museum
Nordamerika Native Museum
Seefeldstrasse 317
8008 Zürich
Switzerland
 | Tuesday – Friday, 13h00 – 17h00 (13h00 – 20h00 on Wednesdays); Saturday – Sunday, 10h00 – 17h00 Museum hours are subject to change. Please contact museum before visiting to confirm the information listed is correct. |
Opened in 2003, the Nordamerika Native Museum is the successor to Zurich's former Indianermuseum, which was created in the beginning of the 1960s to display the Native American art collection of Gottfried Hotz, acquired by the City of Zürich in 1961. Originally housed in a school building in Zürich Aussersihl, the museum expanded its collection over four decades under the direction of Hans Läng and Denise Daenzer. At its new location, the museum displays one or two thematically stuctured exhibitions per year alongside its permanent collection.
The Hotz Collection still constitutes the basis of the museum, focusing mainly on the work of Arctic, Northwest Coast, Subarctic, Southwest, Plains, and Prairie cultures. Special exhibitions concentrate primarily on various aspects of contemporary living conditions in North American indigenous cultures.
Happenings
Tribal art Exhibition
Zurich's Nordamerika Native Museum is showing an exhibition entitled Mantu'c: Little Spirits, die Sprache der Glasperlen (the Language of Glass Beads), which traces the history of the arrival of European-made beads in North America and their use by indigenous populations on that continent. For nearly four centuries, ever-increasing quantities of beads made their way from factories in Bohemia or Murano to satisfy North American Indian demand for them. Indigenous peoples, and later the Inuit, were fascinated by these multicolored, shiny ornaments and incorporated them into divine artistic creations with magical properties. Among the highlights of the show are a Scottish-styled Iroquois hat, a glove decorated with beads representing the Iroquois Confederacy, and pieces acquired from the Crow and brought to Europe by Sister Dorothy at the end of the nineteenth century.