Eugene B. Adkins Collection
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Eugene B. Adkins created one of the premier collections of art of the American Southwest. The University of Oklahoma is pleased to be working with the Eugene B. Adkins Foundation and the Philbrook Museum of Art to encourage research and preservation of this important part of our nation’s cultural history. A native Oklahoman, Eugene Brady Adkins had deep roots in Tulsa, where his grandfather, W. Tate Brady, operated the Brady Hotel, one of the city’s first. He was a civic leader and early advocate for the Tulsa Public Schools. Eugene Adkins earned a degree in art history at Dartmouth College and graduate degrees in business at Stanford University. He frequently spent summers in Santa Fe, which kindled the lifelong interest in the American Southwest that fostered his important collection of Native American art and that of the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies. He was a keen judge of artistic merit and had an encyclopedic knowledge of his collection’s artists and their cultural roots. The University of Oklahoma has a rich heritage in studying and supporting the art of the American Southwest, beginning with the arrival of art professor Oscar Jacobson in 1915. Jacobson developed numerous relationships with the art colonies in Santa Fe and Taos and with the Native American artists of the region. This… exhibition of the Eugene B. Adkins Collection continue[s] the university’s commitment to this artistic heritage. – OU President David L. Boren (1994–2018), excerpted from foreword to The Eugene B. Adkins Collection: Selected Works (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011)
FRED JONES JR.
MUSEUM OF ART
The UNIVERSITY of OKLAHOMA
555 Elm Ave. Norman, OK 73019–3003 fjjma.ou.edu | @fjjma
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Native American Jewelry Collection Eugene B. Adkins Collection Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art
Eugene B. Adkins Native American Jewelry Collection Jewelry, silverwork, and carved fetishes compose the single largest category of art, Native or non-Native, in the Adkins Collection. This jewelry collection is also one of the single largest ever amassed, rivaling that of famed trader C. G. Wallace as well as those of the Fred Harvey Company and School of American Research. Not only is this grouping large, it is also diverse and contains pieces of exquisite craftsmanship, creativity, and historical significance. Although most of the work in the collection can be categorized as jewelry meant to be worn as adornment (bracelets, necklaces and pendants, rings, pins, earrings, buckles), the collection also features various types of objects and serviceware, including teapots, trays, and boxes. Many of the pieces represent distinctive cultural traditions developed by Southwestern jewelers in the late 1800s and passed on through the generations. Other pieces highlight the bold innovations that characterized the modern era of Native design in the 1960s and ‘70s ... Adkins continued collecting into the early twenty-first century, purchasing pieces from the next generation of innovators, who carried on the tradition of experimentation established by [Charles] Loloma and others. – Christina E. Burke, excerpted from “Tradition and Innovation,” The Eugene B. Adkins Collection: Selected Works (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011)