Press surrounds the Lines on the Horizon exhibit at the de Young museum.  Art Fix Daily,  AFA News and the FAMSF site featured information about the exhibit, announcing the Weisel family’s donation of 200 Native American artworks to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The art was put into an exhibit called Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection at the de Young Museum.

“The Thomas W. Weisel Family Collection is an extraordinary anthology of Native American art assembled over three decades by Mr. Weisel,” says the Fine Arts Museums’ site. The donated items span nearly a 1,000-year history from 11^th century Mimbres ceramics to more modern works from the 19^th century. Navajo, Hopi, and other nations are represented in the collection.

In addition to the gift of the artistic pieces, the Weisel family also offered an endowment to the Museums. Because of that endowment, the Museums are able to “further enhance the de Young’s presentation of its permanent collection” as the endowment “supports the Museum’s mission to exhibit and study the indigenous arts of the Americas.”

Notable items from the collection include two Navajo first-phase blankets from the mid-nineteenth century as well as several serapes. “With fewer than 100 first-phase blankets in existence today, these outstanding textiles are exceptionally rare,” says the Museums’ announcement of the new exhibit.

“The strong artistic images drew me to this material but their historical context, as I learned, was equally compelling,” Weisel said of the collection. What the Museums note as being particularly compelling is the possibility of recognizing the hands of the individual pieces who created many of the works.

The articles also offer other information about the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and their history.