First American Art

The companion website to First American Art: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Indian Art, which ran at the National Museum of the American Indian’s George Gustav Heye Center in New York from 2003 to 2006, is everything you expect from the Smithsonian Institution. The exhibition’s organization is thoughtful and original—the pieces are grouped by seven conceptual principles such as integrity, emotion, and intimacy rather than standards like date, type of object, or tribe—while the objects on display are uniformly breathtaking.