MOA’s ethnographic objects come from around world, including the South Pacific, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The MOA building also holds 535,000 archaeological objects under the care of UBC’s Laboratory of Archaeology.
The ethnological collections are comprised of over 15,000 objects from Asia, almost 12,000 from North America (including over 7,100 from B.C. First Nations), approximately 4,300 from South and Central America, 4,000 from the Pacific islands and over 2,300 are from Africa. Over 6,000 pieces in the collection are textiles from all around the world.
More than 38,000 object records are available online (33,000 with images) via our online collections catalogue (MOA CAT), as well as through the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN).
Latin American Art, LACMA
In 1997 Edith and Bernard Lewin, dealers and southern California residents, gave the museum more than two thousand works primarily by Mexican modernists, making LACMA one of the main repositories of Latin American art in the US. Since then, LACMA has focused much attention on building a stellar collection of Latin American art, ranging from ancient to contemporary. Its breadth—with much growth still under way—is what makes LACMA’s collection truly exceptional. Since 2006, the museum has acquired more than 50 important works from the viceregal period, converting the museum into one of the main collections of Spanish colonial art in the United States. Other areas of expansion include the nineteenth century, modern and contemporary art (including postwar geometric abstraction), and Latin American design.
For more image and archival research suggestions, check out this list put together by The Institute of Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame.