Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

At a meeting of New York civic leaders in1869, William Cullen Bryant made the pitch that would launch the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Now that our great railway has been laid from the Atlantic to the Pacific… Men will flock in greater numbers than ever before to plant themselves on a spot so favorable to the exchange of commodities between distant regions ….” Bryant’s vision of the museum as the curative to an unfettered global movement of things and people anticipates a complex relationship between artistic objects, migrants, and the place-based temple of culture that the Met aspired to become. More than a half-century later, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated the money to purchase and house a medieval collection in Ft. Tryon Park (in northern Manhattan), leading to the 1938 opening of The Cloisters, the Met’s medieval outpost. The circumstances surrounding the founding of The Cloisters serve as both an extension and a challenge to the Met’s original mission. Rockefeller, Jr., using the Standard Oil Company fortune amassed by his father through exploitative business practices sought to create a historical context for his family name free of negative associations. The jewel of The Cloister’s collection, the medieval Unicorn tapestries, purchased by Rockefeller in 1922, for instance, allows us to examine the development of this extension of the Met in relation to the anti-immigrant ideologies of the 1920s and ‘30s and how it is intertwined with a neighborhood that was becoming a haven for immigrants and refugees.