We gave a party the other evening for an old friend who is
unfortunately not with us anymore. He
did, however, leave a legacy, The Ralph T. Coe Foundation. To all who knew him he preferred to be called
Ted.
Ralph "Ted" Coe |
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Went to Oberlin college for his undergraduate
degree and to Yale for his Master’s in Art History. After a stint under the famous curator,
director and art historian John Pope Hennessy at the Victoria & Albert
Museum in London, he was hired as a curator at the William Rockhill Nelson
Gallery in Kansas City, where he went on to became director.
As a young art dealer I was introduced to Ted when he came
to visit our gallery. While he was
somewhat older than I, he was a lot younger than my father and cousin who ran
the firm, so we kind of hit it off. The
Nelson, as Kansas City’s art museum is known, bought many works of art from my family, including
paintings, drawings, French 18th Century decorative arts as well as
medieval objects.
Ted w/ Gerald & Penelope |
Years after meeting Ted I sent him to visit Eugene Victor
Thaw a renowned art dealer more into modern fields where Ted bought a painting
by Pissarro. Ted’s father was a major collector
of Impressionists so this was of great interest to Ted and as long as he lived
Ted was an advisor to Henry Bloch of H&R Block who was a trustee of the
museum and formed a great Impressionist collection.
Ted’s true love, however, was tribal art and particularly
the art of the American Indians. In 1976
he did the first international exhibition of Native American art called “Sacred
Circles: Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art” and eventually
decided that pursuing this interest was more interesting to him than being the director of a great
museum. Ted moved to Santa Fe where he continued
working on his next show, “Lost & Found Traditions: Native American Art
1965-1985”. He wanted to show that the creative abilities
of the American Indian still existed as it had hundreds of years ago. He travelled all over the continent
collecting works made in recent years and commissioning works for the show from
many different tribes. He would come
back home to Santa Fe having covered tens of thousands of miles in a single
trip. Around the time of the exhibition
Gene Thaw moved to Santa Fe and Ted guided him in building his great collection
of Native American Art now housed in a separate wing of the James Fennimore
Cooper Museum in Cooperstown, New York
In 2003 just before Ted’s 75th birthday an
exhibition opened at the Metropolitan
Museum in New York with a couple
of hundred Native American objects from his collection which were eventually
bequeathed to the museum. The exhibition
was called, “The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the
Collecting of American Indian Art”.
There you will find much more about this unique scholar and collector
written by his family, friends and colleagues.
Ted did not want his passing to interfere with his mission. He, therefore, set up a Foundation to continue
his effort to share in
his love of life and the pleasure of collecting, transmitting to all who were
willing to listen and learn about tribal heritage and cultures.
Before he died Ted asked his niece, Rachel Wixom, daughter
of the distinguished medievalist, William Wixom, to become executive director
of the Foundation. She left New York and
moved to Santa Fe. She wanted the first
event for the Foundation to be for those who knew and loved Ted. As a member of the Foundation’s Advisory
Committee and having known Ted over more years than anyone else in Santa Fe I
asked that this event be held at our home where ultimately 40 of his friends
and admirers gathered to learn about the Foundation. Rachel told us about some of the goals of
the Foundation. We are establishing a fellowship
which allows someone, probably an advanced student, to come to Santa Fe for two
months with a generous stipend and work on their own project but also work on
the two thousand pieces left in Ted’s collection and organize a small exhibition using
some of them.
Rachel Wixom |
What distinguished Ted from all the others who have studied
native cultures is that he came to it, not as an anthropologist or an
archeologist, but rather as an art historian.
He used that critical eye to distinguish quality in tribal art. We hope that this discipline can be fostered
through the fellowship.
Rachel is working out of her home at the moment and the Foundation
needs a home of it’s own to receive
visitors, house fellowship
winners and allow any staff to work. One hope is to buy Ted’s adobe home where
the collection was assembled and housed for so many years. There it might also be possible to show some
of the collection.
1701 Agua Fria, Santa Fe NM |
The website also needs to be developed and while Ted
catalogued much of the collection it still needs to be made accessible on the
internet which is another complicated and expensive project.
Rachel, the board of directors and the advisory committee have
lots of work ahead of them in in order to realize Ted’s final dream.
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