Arts & Culture
The George Gustav Heye Center, the New York branch of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, occupies the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House on Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. Its collections grew from George Gustav Heye’s Native American collecting, begun in 1903, and from the Museum of the American Indian he founded in 1916. After disputes in the 1980s over the collection’s future, a 1988 compromise brought it into the Smithsonian while preserving a major New York presence, followed by federal legislation in 1989. Opened in the Custom House in 1994, the center pairs nationally significant Native collections and exhibitions with a landmark Beaux-Arts building and programs centered on living Native cultures.
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New York, New York · United States
