On January 31, 1934, Grand Central Art Galleries opened Malvina Hoffman's "The Races of Man," an exhibition of 90 life-sized bronze sculptures. The project had originated in the Field Museum's anthropological display ambitions, and its New York presentation placed Hoffman's sculptural cycle before an art-gallery audience rather than only a museum-of-natural-history public. The opening drew Hoffman, Field Museum director Stanley Field, Mary Pickford, Helen Clay Frick, and other high-profile attendees. Today the work is studied both as a technically ambitious interwar sculptural enterprise and as a revealing document of the period's racial typologies, colonial collecting networks, and museum display assumptions.
The exhibition made Hoffman's Field Museum commission a prominent art-world event while preserving a contested record of interwar racial display.