Scepter
Exhibition History
Selections from the Ralph T. Coe Collection of African Art, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, October 3-December 15, 2002.
The Ralph T. Coe Legacy: Instruments of Passion, El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM, August 9-August 13, 2013.
Connoisseurship and Good Pie: Ted Coe and Collecting Native Art, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, NM, July 25-April 17, 2015-2016.
Possibly a private collector, Kansas City, MO [1];
With a "catch-all shop," Lone Jack, MO, by 1959 [2];
Purchased at this shop by Ralph T. Coe (1929-2010), Santa Fe, NM, 1959-2010;
His bequest to the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, Santa Fe, NM, 2010-2025;
The Coe Center's gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2025.
NOTES:
[1] According to object documentation in the Nelson-Atkins curatorial files, provided by the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts at the time of the object's gift, Coe purchased this object "…in late 1959 at Lone Jack, Missouri in a catch-all shop. It had belonged to one of Boss Prendergast's [sic] bookies who fled Kansas City during the purge and clean-up of the Prendergast [sic] regium [sic]." This reference is to Tom Pendergast, a political boss in Kansas City who exerted widespread influence on the city's government between 1926 and 1939. Following Pendergast's 1939 conviction for tax evasion, a movement to remove his machine's influence from city government took five years.
[2] Ibid.
Oberlin College, Selections from the Ralph T. Coe Collection of African Art (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, Allen Memorial Art Museum, 2002), 42-43, 47, (repro.).
Bruce Bernstein, Connoisseurship and Good Pie: Ted Coe and Collecting Native Art (Santa Fe, NM: Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, 2015), 61, (not illustrated).
