"Collectors and philanthropists Eugene and Clare Thaw are not cultural anthropologists, historians, or natural history museum benefactors. They are art collectors. Eugene Thaw was dealing art by the age of 23. He has had a love affair with the Old Masters that stretches back to the time he spent in Florence after World War II. He is a critic, a collector of Rembrandt and Picasso, and a long time benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, according to Eva Fognell, the curator of the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art, when the Thaws acquired works by North America’s native peoples, they understood that they were collecting art and not cultural artifacts.

It is a key distinction, and as a result, the survey of Native American art, Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection, which opens at the Dallas Museum of Art on April 24, highlights virtuosic craftsmanship, powerful spiritual embodiment, and objects that unknowingly engage in referential dialogue to a western, European artistic traditions. Arranged in a series of galleries delineated by geographic region – and not time of origin, tribe, or even sub-region – works by Florida’s Seminoles share space with pieces from the tribes that populated upstate New York and Canada."

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In Dallas Museum Setting, Native American Art Retains Spiritual Residue (D Magazine 4/21)