The Museum of Modern Art opened Indian Art of the United States, a large survey organized by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board with Rene d'Harnoncourt, Frederic H. Douglas, and Henry Klumb. MoMA's archive gives the run as January 22 to April 27, 1941, and a MoMA press release issued for the opening says the museum opened the exhibition to the public that day. The show assembled roughly one thousand works and filled MoMA with Native American art at a moment when major art museums still often framed Indigenous objects through ethnography rather than art history. Later scholarship treats the exhibition as a landmark for its installation design, catalogue, and role in placing Native arts before modern-art audiences.
It helped make Native American art visible within major modern-art museum discourse.
