‘Races of Mankind’ Sculptures, Long Exiled, Return to Display at Chicago’s Field Museum

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

David Kasnic for The New York Times

For decades, the bronzes created by the artist Malvina Hoffman for the Field Museum’s “Races of Mankind” exhibit have had a ghostly afterlife at the institution. Hailed at their unveiling in 1933 as “the finest racial portraiture the world has yet seen” and viewed by millions of visitors, the sculptures were banished to storage in 1969, embarrassing relics of discredited ideas about human difference. Now the Field Museum has put 50 of the 104 sculptures back on display as part of “Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman.” [link]