He ascribed his later appreciation for the work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian to this initial contact with the tile shapes. Robbins, Speaking of Introductions: Vignettes of a Cultural Pioneer A Journey through Four Careers and Three Continents (Washington, D.C.: Robbins Center for Cross Cultural Communication, 2005), 56.ĭuring his childhood, he became fascinated by the geometric shapes of the tiling in the family bathroom. As an adult, he explained that his Jewish identity allowed him to relate to the struggle for civil rights in America, based on “the historical ties between the Jewish and Black people in their common centuries-long quest for justice.” Warren M.

Robbins was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1923, the youngest of eleven children born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Robbins was its first director until 1983. When the collection became part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1979, it was renamed the National Museum of African Art.

Kathleen Bickford Berzock, and Christa Clarke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 265. Binkley et al., “Building a National Collection of African Art: The Life History of a Museum,” in Representing Africa in American Art Collections: A Century of Collecting and Display, ed. Both the museum and the institute were housed in Northeast Washington, D.C., in a townhouse that had been the home of the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass in the 1870s. In 1966, the museum established the Frederick Douglass Institute of Negro Arts and History, the museum’s educational arm. However, in 1964, by leveraging his diplomatic experience and passion for African art and culture, he founded the Museum of African Art, which he initially privately managed as he sought additional funding. Warren Murray Robbins (1923–2008) was not immensely wealthy, had not been to Africa, and had no experience running museums or formal training in art history prior to the 1960s. We want to be a museum that communicates. We want to show the rich creative heritage of Africa, and to underscore the implications of this heritage in America’s quest for interracial understanding.

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