page_title: African art in Western collections
section_title: Brooklyn Museum
hierarchical_section_title: African art in Western collections / American collections / Brooklyn Museum
caption_attribution_description: English: Mask
context_page_description: Between 1890 and 1918, Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the looting of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art, artifacts or natural heritage that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed. These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums and private collections in Europe and the United States.
context_section_description: In 1903, Stewart Culin (1858–1929) became the founding curator of the Department of Ethnology at the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, now the Brooklyn Museum.  Culin, a self-taught ethnologist, built the foundation of four curatorial collections for the Museum, acquiring objects representing African, Asian, Native American, and Eastern European cultures. Culin was among the first curators to recognize museum installation as an art form. He was also among the first to display ethnological collections as art objects, not as ethnographic specimens. This approach is evidenced in his exhibition "Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo". The exhibition opened in April 1923, and displayed African objects he had acquired in Europe from dealers.
caption: A mask of the We people at the Brooklyn Museum.
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