From January 1963 to April 1964, exhibition sales of “primitive art from New Guinea” were held at US department stores in eight cities, from Los Angeles to Baltimore. Shoppers were offered a wide array of objects, such as masks and shields, old and new, all of them “authentic works made by New Guinea natives, many of whom are just coming out of the Stone Age.” Advertisements in local newspapers assured readers that these “rare pieces of art” would “add a vital, primitive beauty to any home decor.”

Advertisements also noted that these rare pieces were selected by Morton D. May (1914–1983), head of the May Department Stores Company, which included the Hecht Company in Washington, DC, and Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. May was a prominent collector of European fine art, whose trove of German expressionist paintings was internationally known. May also collected Oceanic art, and he sought to share his enthusiasm for the “strong, expressive and aesthetically satisfying” carvings of Melanesian artists with a wider public by organizing exhibition sales at his company’s stores.

Where did the objects at May’s exhibition sales come from? How did May acquire them? How and to whom were exhibition sales marketed? Where did these objects go after they left the store? What might the varied travels of these objects reveal about the sites and circumstances through which they passed? 

I am addressing these questions by writing a “networked biography,” an account of the changes in value and meaning that define nonhuman things over the course of what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls their “social lives.” My networked biography features some of the thousands of artifacts that in the early 1960s left the territories of Papua and New Guinea then administered by Australia. Tracking these objects—arrows, spears, drums, and ceremonial carvings of all kinds—brings to light connections between people and places ordinarily imagined as worlds apart.

My research at the Center has moved in two directions. First, I have researched the robust trade that developed during the late 1950s in the Papuan Gulf and Sepik River areas of what is today the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, regions known for their prodigious output of art. This trade entangled local makers with European missionaries, private dealers, museum collectors, and government officials, and it provided rare opportunities for people living in remote areas to acquire the income necessary for realizing the alluring promises of development and modernity. I have focused on the independent field collectors who provided May with objects for both his growing personal collection and his department store exhibition sales. Contemporary newspaper accounts and memoirs of these field collectors provide glimpses of how local New Guinea people participated in the trade, thereby recovering forms of Indigenous agency often absent from histories of “primitive art.” 

Second, I have researched the market for Oceanic art in New York City in the late 1950s, focusing on the dealer Julius Carlebach (1909–1964), who sold objects to May for the exhibition sales. Carlebach also sold to Nelson Rockefeller, who opened the Museum of Primitive Art in 1957 and subsequently lobbied the Metropolitan Museum of Art to accept his collection, a gift that publicly validated “primitive art” as universal fine art. Like May, Carlebach aspired to broaden the audience for appreciating and owning original “primitive art,” which he promoted as an affordable and tasteful aspect of modern home decor. Marketing was accordingly aimed at middle-class women. Carlebach and May’s efforts, and the department store more generally, thus figured in the production of American middlebrow culture.

My networked biography is a form of thickly described provenance, and its tracking or “follow-the-thing” method converges with recent initiatives in art history to expand the definition of provenance beyond identifying previous owners. I have been following the journey of one striking ancestral figure, carved male on one side, female on the other. This carving, unusually attributed to a named individual, Wambangu, was collected in New Guinea in 1962, sold to Carlebach, purchased by May, and exhibited at May’s store in Pittsburgh. May donated the carving to the Baltimore Museum of Art, which deaccessioned it for auction in 1986. When the carving reappeared in an online auction in 2023, I bought it for $325 and donated it to the Buffalo Museum of Science, where curator Kathryn Leacock and I plan to include it in an exhibit about “the stories objects tell.”

University of Rochester
Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow, March–April 2025

Robert J. Foster will return to his position as Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities in the Department of Anthropology and Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. In 2026 he will be a visiting fellow at the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.