Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

The result of extensive recent research, Migrating Objects reveals Peggy Guggenheim’s two-decade period of collecting beyond the European and North American art with which she is usually associated

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) began to turn her attentions as a collector toward the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Migrating Objects focuses on this lesser-known but crucial episode in her life and activities. In these years, Guggenheim acquired works created by artists from cultures worldwide, including early 20th-century sculpture from Mali, the Ivory Coast and New Guinea, and ancient examples from Mexico and Peru.

Migrating Objects emerges from an extended period of research and discussion on this largely ignored area of Guggenheim’s collection by a curatorial advisory committee, which has yielded exciting results, including the reattribution of individual works, among them the Nigerian headdress (Ago Egungun) produced by the workshop of Oniyide Adugbologe–illustrated here alongside other pieces that will greatly expand understanding of Guggenheim’s collecting.