Museum Practice: Confronting the Past

Rethinking the Sculptures

In 1933 these sculptures were presented as anonymous examples of racial types. In 2016, the Field Museum exhibition team created a new exhibit. They felt that knowing the subjects’ names was an important part of seeing them as individuals, and spent months in the Museum’s archives reading Hoffman’s and her husband’s letters and journals, and consulting the work of others who have researched the Hoffman collection over the years.

How does it make a difference to showcase the names of the individuals represented in the exhibit? How is your identity important to you? Does your name matter to you?
Desideria Montoya Sanchez, a San Ildefonso Pueblo woman from New Mexico, United States

This piece seen in the previous section was labeled "San Ildefonso Pueblo Woman," in the original exhibit in 1933. After the Field Museum team's research the piece was revealed to be a portrait of Desideria Montoya Sanchez, a member of a famous pottery-making family in New Mexico.

This man from Southern India showed Hoffman the climbing technique used to collect sap from palm trees to make wine. Many species of palm tree can grow to over 80 feet in height. Using two loops of rope, this man could climb to their tops to collect the sap in special containers. This simple but effective technology requires more work than simply cutting the tree down—but it helps people use a natural resource without destroying it.

If you didn't know anything about the individuals on display, how would you perceive them? How were they portrayed in the first exhibit compared to the second?
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