The Dedrick Collection

This donation of a wide range of objects from a major museum benefactor establishes whole areas within the collection, as well as expanding and enriching every other area. The Dedrick donations include the oldest pieces in the Pre-Columbian, Ancient Near East and Classical collections. This collection brings us our complete holdings in early prints (including Schongauer, Durer and Lucas Cranach, among others), as well as prints of the 17th and 18th centuries (Gottsius, Hogarth, and William Blake).

Textiles are the greatest strength of this collection, which begins with Coptic material. The collector's vision of the aesthetic to be found in tribal cultures includes costumes, tapas, ikats, warrior costumes, headdresses, a mountain Toraja warrior's armor of deer jawbones, and gold fabrics of the Maninkabau. Extensive ethnographic holdings, representing five continents, magnify the significance of this collection, allowing whole cultures to be represented.

In addition, a major group of Pre-Columbian pottery, small stone carvings, and carved petrified ivory spans the Western Hemisphere from the Bering Straits to South America. Textiles, baskets, and pottery of the 19th and 20th century Native American groups represent almost as wide a geographical distribution.

This benefactor was a retired professor of art, with many ties to the late 20th century European and American art world. Consequently, the collection also includes a very large number of modern and contemporary paintings and prints, both European (Redon, Miro, Ernst, Belmar, Kollwitz and others) and American (A.B. Davies, Blackshear, Ginzel, Jenkyn, Poska, Langoussis and more). Among the contemporary sculptures in the collection is Chuck Johnson's wonderful ceramic rhinoceros-cum-cathedral, which has become a symbol of the Freeport Art Museum.