Arthur Billings Hunt photograph collection

Content Description

The Arthur Billings Hunt photograph collection consists of fifteen photographic prints dating to the 1870s and 1880s. The bulk of the photographs are studio portraits and depict a number of Hunkpapa Lakota (Hunkpapa Sioux) and Yanktonnai Nakota (Yankton Sioux) community members and leaders. These photographs represent the work of various turn of the twentieth-century photographers of the American West including David F. Barry, Orlando Scott Goff, F. Jay Haynes, and Laton Alton Huffman. The photographs were later acquired by Arthur Billings Hunt, who subsequently donated them to the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation.

Arrangement

This collection is arranged into folders by cultural group.

Biographical / Historical

Arthur Billings Hunt was born in 1890. He attended schooling at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, receiving his undergraduate degree there in 1911, and later was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the same institution in 1945. Moving to New York soon after graduation, Hunt had a lifelong career as a well-known soloist, musical director, broadcaster, and collector of Christian Americana. In addition to conducting a weekly broadcast of singing services for fourteen years with the New York Federation of Churches on radio station WEAF, Hunt also served as the Executive Director of the National Hymn Sing Association. While primarily interested in collecting Christian hymnals and sheet music himself, Hunt also inherited from his maternal grandfather, Newell B. Perkins, a number of material culture objects and photographic images related to different North American Plains Indian communities. These he subsequently donated to the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in the mid-twentieth century. Arthur Billings Hunt died in 1971 at the age of 81.

Related Materials

Other archival collections relating to the life and work of Arthur Billings Hunt include the Arthur Billings Hunt papers, located in the Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections.