| National Museum of Ethnography | |
|---|---|
The neo-renaissance building of the museum designed by E. Marconi. |
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| Established | 1888 |
| Location | Warsaw |
| Type | ethnography |
| Director | Adam Czyżewski |
| Website | Methnomuseum.website.pl |
Państwowe Muzeum Etnograficzne w Warszawie is a museum in Warsaw, Poland. It was established in 1888.
The collection is made of objects, folk art and art from Poland, Europe, Africa, Australia, Oceania and Latin and South America: costumes, crafts, sculptures, painting. The museum has a permanent exhibition, a library (around 26 000 volumes[1]), a Photographic and Film Records Studio and a Central Repository for Museum's Collections; it produces temporary exhibitions, research projects and publications. The museum is managed by a director and it is organized in the departments of Polish and European ethnography, Non-European ethnography, adult education, educational, communication and marketing, publications, organizational, archival material and photographic and film records, accounting and finance, personnel, administrative and technical, inventory and conservation. The Museum publishes the magazine "Zeszyty Muzealne" from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s; in October 2009 it starts a new quarterly magazine called "Etnografia Nowa" ["The New Ethnography"][2]. In 2011 the museum receives a grants to renew the museum and create a Children museum[3].
The permanent exhibitions presented inside the museum are:
The Polish collection is composted of around 13500 exhibited in the permanent collection and over 1000 in the deposits[4]; the African collection is the richest collection of the museum with over 10 thousand objects mainly form Sub-Saharan Africa. The African collection is based on a donation by Wacław Korabiewicz which includes domestic and agricultural utensils, arms, costumes and clothings, jewelry, royal insignia, sculptures, masks and objects related to religious practices. In 1988 also Aleksandra and Cyprian Kosiński contributed to the museum African collection with sculptures, masks and royal costumes of the Congolese tribes Bakuba, Bakongo, Chokwe. According to the museum[5], one of the most important object of the African collection is a helmet masks made by the East African Makonde tribe (Tanzania, Mozambique) coming from Wacław Korabiewicz's collection.