George Gustav Heye

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George Gustav Heye (1874-1957)

George Gustav Heye (1874-1957) was a collector of Native American artifacts. His collection became the core of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Heye was the son of Carl Friederich Gustav Heye; and Marie Antoinette Lawrence of Hudson, New York. Carl was a German immigrant who earned his wealth in the petroleum industry.

George Gustav graduated from Columbia College (now Columbia University) in 1896 with a degree in electrical engineering. While doing railroad construction in Arizona in 1897, he acquired a Navajo deerskin shirt, as his first artifact. He acquired individual items until 1903, then he began collecting material in larger numbers. In 1901, he started a career in investment banking that lasted until 1909. He accumulated the largest private collection of Native American objects in the world. The collection was initially stored in Heye’s Madison Avenue apartment in New York City, and later, in a rented room. Eventually, the collection was moved to the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian at 155th Street and Broadway. The museum opened to the public in 1922, and closed in 1994, when the Smithsonian opened the Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan.

[edit] Museum of the American Indian

He created the Museum of the American Indian in 1916 in New York City and was its director until 1956. His collection of Native American materials, were collected over a period of 45 years. This collection became the basis of the Museum of the American Indian and is the largest in the world. It houses over one million objects from indigenous peoples from the Western Hemisphere. The Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, collection was transferred to the Smithsonian in 1989, when National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution was created.