Roscoe Conkling
Roscoe Conkling was a politician from New York who served both as a member of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate. He was the leader of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party, the first Republican senator from New York to be elected for three terms, the last person to turn down a U. S. Supreme Court appointment after he had been confirmed to the post. While in the House, Conkling served as bodyguard for Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a sharp-tongued anti-slavery representative, supported the Republican War effort. Conkling, temperate and detested tobacco, was known for his physical condition, maintained through regular exercise and boxing, an unusual devotion for his time. Conkling was elected to the Senate in 1867 as a leading Radical, who supported the rights of African Americans during Reconstruction; as leader of the Stalwarts, Conkling controlled patronage at the New York Customs House. Although Conkling was supported by President Ulysses S. Grant, Conkling did not support Grant's Civil Service Commission reform initiative.
Conkling refused to accept Grant's nomination of him as Chief Justice of the United States, believing his talents belonged in the Senate. The control over patronage led to a bitter conflict between Conkling and President Rutherford B. Hayes. Conkling opposed Hayes's appointment of William M. Evarts as Secretary of State. Conkling publicly led opposition to Hayes's attempt to impose Civil Service Reform on the New York Customs House. In 1880, Conkling supported Grant for President. Conkling's conflict with Garfield over New York Customs House patronage led to his resignation from the Senate in May 1881. Upon Garfield's assassination in 1881, Vice President Chester A. Arthur became President; when he offered his friend Conkling an associate justiceship on the Supreme Court, Conkling accepted the offer and was confirmed by the Senate. However, Conkling refused to serve, the last person to have done so, he practiced law in New York until his death in 1888. Conkling was born on October 30, 1829, in Albany, New York, to Alfred Conkling, a U.
S. Representative and federal judge and his wife Eliza Cockburn. Raised in an atmosphere of law and politics, early associations with notable figures of the day left an impression on young Roscoe. However, described by his father as "utterly untutored" and a "romping boy," Roscoe was left in the care of Professor George W. Clarke at the Mount Washington Collegiate Institute in New York City so that he may "be trained to studious habits." While referring to a 1787 British textbook titled "The Art of Speaking," which emphasized the importance of facial action and gesture and his older brother took lessons in diction from an English professor named Harvey and delivered speeches to each other for practice's sake. Roscoe entered the Auburn Academy in 1843, where he remained for three years; as a schoolboy, Roscoe's intimidating appearance and intellect demanded attention. As a childhood friend describes him, young Roscoe was "as large and massive in his mind as he was in his frame, accomplished in his studies what he did in his social life — a mastery and command which his companions yielded to him as due."
At the age of seventeen, Roscoe opted to forego a college education in favor of studying law under Joshua A. Spencer and Francis Kernan in Utica, New York. Roscoe made an impression upon his preceptors; when asked to supply a Whig orator who could stand up to Democratic bullies at a local village meeting, Spencer's response was "I shall send Mr. Conkling. Integrating himself into the "society" in Utica, Roscoe made himself heard on a variety of issues those concerning human rights. For example, though only eighteen at the time, Roscoe's deep sympathy for the sufferers of the Great Famine in Ireland led him to speak on behalf of victims of starvation at various venues in Central New York. Additionally, as Theodore M. Pomeroy recalls fifteen years before the Civil War Roscoe displayed a deep abhorrence for slavery, or as he described it, "man's inhumanity to man." He married Julia Catherine Seymour, sister of the Democratic politician and Governor of New York Horatio Seymour. His first political endeavor came in 1848, when he made campaign speeches on behalf of Taylor and Fillmore.
He was admitted to the bar in 1850, in the same year became district attorney of Oneida County by appointment of Governor Fish. In 1852 he returned to Utica, where in the next few years he established a reputation as a lawyer of ability. Up to 1852, in which year he stumped New York State for General Winfield Scott, the Whig candidate for the presidency, Conkling was identified with the Whig Party, but in the movement that resulted in the organization of the Republican Party he took an active part, his work, both as a political manager and an orator, contributed toward carrying New York in 1856 for Frémont and Dayton, the Republican nominees. Conkling was elected Mayor of Utica in 1858, elected as a Republican to the 36th and 37th United States Congresses, holding office from March 4, 1859, to March 3, 1863, he was Chairman of the U. S. House Committee on the District of Columbia, he refused to follow the financial policy of his party in 1862, delivered a notable speech against the passage of the Legal Tender Act, which made a certain class of treasury notes receivable for all public and private debts.
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Ojibwe
The Ojibwe, Chippewa, or Saulteaux are an Anishinaabe people of Canada and the United States. They are one of the most numerous indigenous peoples north of the Rio Grande. In Canada, they are the second-largest First Nations population, surpassed only by the Cree. In the United States, they have the fifth-largest population among Native American peoples, surpassed in number only by the Navajo, Cherokee and Sioux; the Ojibwe people traditionally speak the Ojibwe language, a branch of the Algonquian language family. They are part of the Council of Three Fires and the Anishinaabeg, which include the Algonquin, Oji-Cree and the Potawatomi. Through the Saulteaux branch, they were a part of the Iron Confederacy, joining the Cree and Metis; the majority of the Ojibwe people live in Canada. There are 77,940 mainline Ojibwe, they live from western Quebec to eastern British Columbia. As of 2010, Ojibwe in the US census population is 170,742; the Ojibwe are known for their birch bark canoes, birch bark scrolls and trade in copper, as well as their cultivation of wild rice and Maple syrup.
Their Midewiwin Society is well respected as the keeper of detailed and complex scrolls of events, oral history, maps, stories and mathematics. The Ojibwe people underwent colonization by Settler-Canadians, they signed treaties with settler leaders, many European settlers soon inhabited the Ojibwe ancestral lands. The exonym for this Anishinaabe group is Ojibwe; this name is anglicized as "Ojibwa" or "Ojibway". The name "Chippewa" is an alternative anglicization. Although many variations exist in literature, "Chippewa" is more common in the United States, "Ojibway" predominates in Canada, but both terms are used in each country. In many Ojibwe communities throughout Canada and the U. S. since the late 20th century, more members have been using the generalized name Anishinaabe. The exact meaning of the name Ojibwe is not known; some 19th century sources say this name described a method of ritual torture that the Ojibwe applied to enemies. Ozhibii'iwe, meaning "those who keep records ", referring to their form of pictorial writing, pictographs used in Midewiwin sacred rites.
Because many Ojibwe were located around the outlet of Lake Superior, which the French colonists called Sault Ste. Marie for its rapids, the early Canadian settlers referred to the Ojibwe as Saulteurs. Ojibwe who subsequently moved to the prairie provinces of Canada have retained the name Saulteaux; this is disputed. Ojibwe who were located along the Mississagi River and made their way to southern Ontario are known as the Mississaugas; the Ojibwe language is known as Anishinaabemowin or Ojibwemowin, is still spoken, although the number of fluent speakers has declined sharply. Today, most of the language's fluent speakers are elders. Since the early 21st century, there is a growing movement to revitalize the language, restore its strength as a central part of Ojibwe culture; the language belongs to the Algonquian linguistic group, is descended from Proto-Algonquian. Its sister languages include Blackfoot, Cree, Menominee and Shawnee among the northern Plains tribes. Anishinaabemowin is referred to as a "Central Algonquian" language.
Ojibwemowin is the fourth-most spoken Native language in North America after Navajo and Inuktitut. Many decades of fur trading with the French established the language as one of the key trade languages of the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains; the popularity of the epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855, publicized the Ojibwe culture. The epic contains many toponyms. According to Ojibwe oral history and from recordings in birch bark scrolls, the Ojibwe originated from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River on the Atlantic coast of what is now Quebec, they traded across the continent for thousands of years as they migrated, knew of the canoe routes to move north, west to east, south in the Americas. The identification of the Ojibwe as a culture or people may have occurred in response to contact with Europeans; the Europeans tried to identify those they encountered. According to Ojibwe oral history, seven great miigis beings appeared to them in the Waabanakiing to teach them the mide way of life.
One of the seven great miigis beings was too spiritually powerful and killed the people in the Waabanakiing when they were in its presence. The six great miigis beings remained to teach; the six great miigis beings established doodem for people in the east, symbolized by animal, fish or bird species. The five original Anishinaabe doodem were the Wawaazisii, Aan'aawenh and Moozoonsii these six miigis beings returned into the ocean as well. If the seventh miigis being had stayed
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, represent the core of his thinking, they include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", "Experience."
Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, the ability for mankind to realize anything, the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, his work has influenced the thinkers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist. Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, a son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister.
He was named after his mother's brother his father's great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo. Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons. Three other children—Phebe, John Clarke, Mary Caroline—died in childhood. Emerson was of English ancestry, his family had been in New England since the early colonial period. Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before Emerson's eighth birthday. Emerson was raised with the help of the other women in the family, she lived with the family off and on and maintained a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863. Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812. In October 1817, at 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president, requiring Emerson to fetch delinquent students and send messages to faculty. Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called "Wide World".
He took outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher working with his uncle Samuel and aunt Sarah Ripley in Waltham, Massachusetts. By his senior year, Emerson decided to go by Waldo. Emerson served as Class Poet, he graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59 people. In 1826, faced with poor health, Emerson went to seek a warmer climate, he first found the weather was still too cold. He went farther south, to St. Augustine, where he took long walks on the beach and began writing poetry. While in St. Augustine he made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Murat was two years his senior; the two engaged in enlightening discussions of religion, society and government. Emerson considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual education. While in St. Augustine, Emerson had his first encounter with slavery. At one point, he attended a meeting of the Bible Society while a slave auction was taking place in the yard outside.
He wrote, "One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with'Going, going!'" After Harvard, Emerson assisted his brother William in a school for young women established in their mother's house, after he had established his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Emerson was accepted into the Harvard Divinity School in late 1824, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1828. Emerson's brother Edward, two years younger than he, entered the office of the lawyer Daniel Webster, after graduating from Harvard first in his class. Edward's physical health began to deteriorate, he soon suffered a mental collapse as well. Although he recovered his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834 from long-standing tuberculosis. Another of Emerson's bright and promising younger brothers, born in 1808, died in 1836 of tuberculos
James K. Polk
James Knox Polk was the 11th president of the United States from 1845 to 1849. He was speaker of the House of Representatives and governor of Tennessee. A protégé of Andrew Jackson, he was a member of the Democratic Party and an advocate of Jacksonian democracy. Polk is chiefly known for extending the territory of the United States during the Mexican–American War. After building a successful law practice in Tennessee, Polk was elected to the state legislature and to the United States House of Representatives in 1825, becoming a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson. After serving as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he became Speaker in 1835, the only president to have been Speaker. Polk left Congress to run for governor, he was a dark horse candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1844. In the general election, Polk defeated Henry Clay of the rival Whig Party. Polk is considered by many the most effective president of the pre–Civil War era, having met during his four-year term every major domestic and foreign policy goal he had set.
After a negotiation fraught with risk of war, he reached a settlement with the United Kingdom over the disputed Oregon Country, the territory for the most part being divided along the 49th parallel. Polk achieved a sweeping victory in the Mexican–American War, which resulted in the cession by Mexico of nearly all the American Southwest, he secured a substantial reduction of tariff rates with the Walker tariff of 1846. The same year, he achieved his other major goal, re-establishment of the Independent Treasury system. True to his campaign pledge to serve only one term, Polk left office in 1849 and returned to Tennessee. Scholars have ranked Polk favorably for his ability to promote and achieve the major items on his presidential agenda, but he has been criticized for leading the country into war against Mexico and for exacerbating sectional divides. A slaveholder for most of his adult life, he owned a plantation in Mississippi and bought slaves while President. A major legacy of Polk's presidency is territorial expansion, as the United States reached the Pacific coast and became poised to be a world power.
James Knox Polk was born on November 1795 in a log cabin in Pineville, North Carolina. He was the first of 10 children born into a family of farmers, his mother Jane named him after James Knox. His father Samuel Polk was a farmer and surveyor of Scots-Irish descent; the Polks had immigrated to America in the late 1600s, settling on the Eastern Shore of Maryland but moving to south-central Pennsylvania and to the Carolina hill country. The Knox and Polk families were Presbyterian. While Polk's mother remained a devout Presbyterian, his father, whose own father Ezekiel Polk was a deist, rejected dogmatic Presbyterianism, he refused to declare his belief in Christianity at his son's baptism, the minister refused to baptize young James. James' mother "stamped her rigid orthodoxy on James, instilling lifelong Calvinistic traits of self-discipline, hard work, individualism, a belief in the imperfection of human nature," according to James A. Rawley's American National Biography article. In 1803, Ezekiel Polk led four of his adult children and their families to the Duck River area in what is now Maury County, Tennessee.
The Polk clan dominated politics in the new town of Columbia. Samuel became a county judge, the guests at his home included Andrew Jackson, who had served as a judge and in Congress. James learned from the political talk around the dinner table. Polk suffered from frail health as a particular disadvantage in a frontier society, his father took him to see prominent Philadelphia physician Dr. Philip Syng Physick for urinary stones; the journey was broken off by James's severe pain, Dr. Ephraim McDowell of Danville, operated to remove them. No anesthetic was available except brandy; the operation was successful, but it might have left James impotent or sterile, as he had no children. He recovered and became more robust, his father offered to bring him into one of his businesses, but he wanted an education and enrolled at a Presbyterian academy in 1813. He became a member of the Zion Church near his home in 1813, enrolled in the Zion Church Academy, he entered Bradley Academy in Murfreesboro, where he proved a promising student.
In January 1816, Polk was admitted into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a second-semester sophomore. The Polk family had connections with the university a small school of about 80 students. Polk's roommate was William Dunn Moseley. Polk joined the Dialectic Society where he took part in debates, became its president, learned the art of oratory. In one address, he warned that some American leaders were flirting with monarchical ideals, singling out Alexander Hamilton, a foe of Jefferson. Polk graduated with honors in
National Academy of Design
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, others "to promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition." The original founders of the National Academy of Design were students of the American Academy of the Fine Arts. However, by 1825 the students of the American Academy felt a lack of support for teaching from the academy, its board composed of merchants and physicians, from its unsympathetic president, the painter John Trumbull. Samuel Morse and other students set about forming "the drawing association", to meet several times each week for the study of the art of design. Still, the association was viewed as a dependent organization of the American Academy, from which they felt neglected. An attempt was made to reconcile differences and maintain a single academy by appointing six of the artists from the association as directors of the American Academy.
When four of the nominees were not elected, the frustrated artists resolved to form a new academy and the National Academy of Design was born. Morse had been a student at the Royal Academy in London and emulated its structure and goals for the National Academy of Design. After three years and some tentative names, in 1828 the academy found its longstanding name "National Academy of Design", under which it was known for one and a half centuries. In 1997, newly appointed director Annette Blaugrund rebranded the institution as the "National Academy Museum and School of Fine Art", to reflect "a new spirit of integration incorporating the association of artists and school", to avoid confusion with the now differently understood term "design"; this change was reversed in 2017. 1825 The New York Drawing Association 1826 The National Academy of The Arts of Design 1828 The National Academy of Design 1997 The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Art 2017 The National Academy of Design The Academy occupied several locations in Manhattan over the years.
Notable among them was a building on Park Avenue and 23rd Street designed by architect P. B. Wight and built 1863–1865 in a Venetian Gothic style modeled on the Doge's Palace in Venice. Another location was at West 109th Amsterdam Avenue. Since 1942 the academy has occupied a mansion at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street, the former home of sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington, who donated the house in 1940; the academy is a professional honorary organization, with a museum. One cannot apply for membership, which since 1994, after many changes in numbers, is limited to 450 American artists and architects. Instead, members are elected by their peers on the basis of recognized excellence. Full members of the National Academy are identified by the post-nominal "NA", associates by "ANA"; the school offers studio instruction, master classes, intensive critiques, various workshops, lunchtime lectures. Scholarships are available; the museum houses a public collection of over 7,000 works of American art from the 19th, 20th, 21st centuries.
As of November 2018 the academy's Board of Governors consists of 18 board members, with Bruce Fowle as President and James Siena as Chairman of the Abbey Council. Maura Reilly serves as Executive Director since 2015. Among the teaching staff were numerous artists, including Will Hicok Low, who taught from 1889 to 1892; the famous American poet William Cullen Bryant gave lectures. Architect Alexander Jackson Davis taught at the academy. Painter Lemuel Wilmarth was the first full-time instructor. Silas Dustin was a curator; some of the Academy's better-known members include: American Watercolor Society Effects of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 on museums List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City Official website National Academy of Design at Google Cultural Institute
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives and airbrushes, can be used; the final work is called a painting. Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, composition, narration, or abstraction. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, abstract, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by religious art. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery, to Biblical scenes Sistine Chapel ceiling, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin. In art, the term painting describes the result of the action; the support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, canvas, glass, pottery, leaf and concrete, the painting may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, paper, gold leaf, as well as objects.
Color, made up of hue and value, dispersed over a surface is the essence of painting, just as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West; some painters, theoreticians and scientists, including Goethe and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent; the word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as F or C♯. For a painter, color is not divided into basic and derived colors. Painters deal with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, Cobalt blue, so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not speaking, means of painting.
Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, because of this, the perception of a painting is subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to "light" in painting, "shades" to dynamics, "coloration" is to painting as the specific timbre of musical instruments is to music; these elements do not form a melody of themselves. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting to include, as one example, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense; some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Anselm Kiefer. There is a growing community of artists who use computers to "paint" color onto a digital "canvas" using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, many others; these images can be printed onto traditional canvas. Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature. I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature.
Rhythm, for artists such as Piet Mondrian, is important in painting as it is in music. If one defines rhythm as "a pause incorporated into a sequence" there can be rhythm in paintings; these pauses allow creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art, it directly affects the aesthetic value of that work; this is because the aesthetic value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the aesthetic value. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Wassily Kandinsky used musical terms to identify his works. Kandinsky theorized that "music is the ultimate teacher," and subsequently embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions.
Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet. In 1871 the young Kandinsky learned to play the cello. Kandinsky's stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" illustrates his "synaesthetic" concept of a universal correspondence of forms and musical sounds. Music d
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world, its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; the permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art.
The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries; the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, was located at 681 Fifth Avenue; the Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art; the Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, antique weapons and armor from around the world.
A great number of period rooms, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and hosts large traveling shows throughout the year; the current chairman of the board, Daniel Brodsky, was elected in 2011 and became chairman three years after director Philippe de Montebello retired at the end of 2008. On March 1, 2017, the BBC reported that Daniel Weiss, the Met's president and COO, would temporarily act as CEO for the museum. Following the departure of Thomas P. Campbell as the Met's director and CEO on June 30, 2017, the search for a new director of the museum was assigned to the human resources firm Phillips Oppenheim to present a new candidate for the position "by the end of the fiscal year in June" of 2018; the next director will report to Weiss as the current president of the museum. In April 2018, Max Hollein was named director. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East.
From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the Met's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Sasanian, Assyrian and Elamite cultures, as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects; the highlights of the collection include a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum.
The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foot-tall memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls. The range of materials represented in the Africa and Americas collection is undoubtedly the widest of any department at the Met, including everything from precious metals to porcupine quills; the Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, arguably the most comprehensive in the US. The collection dates back to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections. Today, an entire wing of the museum is dedicated to the Asian collection, spans 4,000 years of Asian art; every Asian civilization is represented in the Met's Asian department, the pieces on display include every type of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking.
The department is well known for its comprehensive collection of Chinese calligraphy and painting, as well as for its Indian sculptures and Tibetan works, the arts of Burma and Thailand. All three ancient religions of India – Hinduism and Jainism – are well represented in these s
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. Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1892.
