Lot 113 D α

George C. Kennedy was professor of Geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He made a number of trips to New Guinea in the early 1960s where the Catholic missions were having great success in converting the local populations to Christianity and persuading them to abandon their traditional practises and artefacts. The Catholic Missions helped Kennedy amass his vast collection which would later be exhibited at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1964/5); St. Louis Art Museum, the Ethnic Arts Galleries of the UCLA Museum (1967); the Art Institute of Chicago (1971); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and twice at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana (1975 and 1979).