The extraordinary efforts of the collector Katherine White began in 1949, when she purchased this whistle in Poitiers, France. While on what she called the "cathedral tour" with her family, she saw this figure twirling around the top of a stand in a postcard shop and decided then and there to become a collector. She subsequently went on to college, worked for a museum in Philadelphia, and assisted with a television series called "What in the World?" In 1961, White launched a twenty-year quest in which she amassed a collection of over 2,000 carefully chosen objects that were given to this museum in 1981.
Wood and horn
L.: 8 1/2 in.
Gift of Katherine White and the Boeing Company
81.17.830
Not currently on view
Resources
Exhibition HistoryLos Angeles, California, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act, Jan. 20 - Mar. 17, 1974 (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, May 5 - Sept. 22, 1974). Text by Robert Farris Thompson. No cat. no., pp. 74-75, reproduced pl. 103.
Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Music for the Eyes: The Fine Art of African Musical Instruments, Sept. 15, 1999 - July 31, 2000.
Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, The Untold Story, Nov. 14, 2003 - Nov. 14, 2004.
Seattle Art Museum respectfully acknowledges that we are on Indigenous land, the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people. We honor our ongoing connection to these communities past, present, and future.
