smithsonian latino art collections - Smithsonian Latino Center

An Overview of the History of the Exhibitions and Art Collections at the
Smithsonian Institution, 1880-2010
Olga Ulloa Herrera
The Smithsonian Institution has a history of collecting and exhibiting Latino/Hispanic and Latin
American art and artifacts that dates back to the 1880s. In a June 2000 report, former National
Museum of American History curator Richard E. Ahlborn wrote about the practices of exhibiting cultural
objects of Spanish/Hispanic and Latin American origins during the last decades of the Nineteenth
Century at the United States National Museum (now the Arts and Industries Building, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC). 2 According to his own research findings, anthropologists and ethnologists
affiliated with the Institution in the 1880s and 1890s collected Western and Southwest Spanish Catholic
images of santos, carvings and other objects which were on permanent display at the U.S. National
Museum as photographs of the time at the Smithsonian Institution Archives tell.
When the U.S. National Museum outgrew its space in the first years of the 20 th century, a new
building on the north side of the National Mall was completed in 1910 to accommodate the expanding
anthropology, art and natural history collections. Although Hispanic collections were on view and
exhibitions of artists from Latin America were organized in the new National Museum’s central skylighted
Art Hall in collaboration with the Pan American Union beginning in 1933, 3 it was not until the late
1940s when ethno-historian John Canfield Ewers and cultural historian C. Malcolm Watkins joined the
institution as associate curators of ethnology, that the Smithsonian Institution started to actively acquire
and develop Hispanic collections related to their areas of expertise on the history of the American Indian
of the West 4 and American material culture, technology and decorative arts, respectively 5 .
In the early 1950s the focus of collecting expanded to the Americas as Ewers became involved in
the Institution’s Exhibits Modernization Program, which called for the redesign and redevelopment of
exhibition halls, in particular Hall 9 and Hall 11, which were to be dedicated to New World ethnology.
The new configuration and arrangement of wall cases and miniature dioramas, according to Ewers,
“provide[d] an ordered, graphic interpretation of the ethnology of the Native Peoples of the New World,
from the Polar Eskimo to the Indians of Tierra de Fuego.” 6 One such cases dedicated to Pueblo Religious
Ceremonialism/Christianity and Pueblo Indians featured, according to Alhborn, “a fine leather painting
and wood work by Hispanic New Mexicans.” 7 Also under the Exhibits Modernization Program, in 1957
Watkins in turn organized the first large exhibit on everyday life in colonial and federal United States. 8
In the late 1950s the Institution underwent a new period of expansion with the proposed
Museum of History and Technology, which was conceptualized and created in 1958. Ewers joined it as
its new administrative officer while Watkins became head of its new Division of Cultural History in the
Department of Civil History.
2 Richard E. Ahlborn. “Exhibits at the Smithsonian with ‘Latino’ Artifacts.” 23 October 2000. Author’s archive.
3 For a list of exhibitions of Latin American Art, see “Notes on Latin American Exhibitions from 1933-1946.”
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 311, Box 42, Folder 2.
4 Margaret R. Dittmore. “John C. Ewers,” February 9, 1999.
http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/BAE/Bulletin1964/ewersbio.htm accessed 1 August 2011.
5 Smithsonian Institution Archives, C. Malcolm Watkins Papers, 1935-1979 and undated. Historical Note.
http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/faru7322.htm accessed 1 August 2011.
6 John C. Ewers, “Problems and Procedures in Modernizing Ethnological Exhibits.” American Anthropologist, Vol.
57, No. 1 (Feb. 1955): 2.
7 Alhborn, 2000, p. 1. Also see, Ewers, 1955: 11.
8 Smithsonian Institution Archives, C. Malcolm Watkins Papers, Historical Note.
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