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An anonymous Kansas City resident shares his extensive American Indian art collection with a Lawrence museum.

Art is in the eye of the beholder, and a new exhibition at the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art provides a look at one collector's passion for American Indian art.

"Personal Choices: American Indian Art from a Private Collection" includes objects created in the past millennium that were collected over the past 40 years by a Kansas City collector, who requested he remain anonymous.

"One senses there is a coherent vision and (the objects were) chosen by a person who has a thoughtful, careful and emotional response to art," Andrea Norris, director of the Spencer Museum, said. " " He's a dream to work with. He's the most constructive, supportive and generous collector you can imagine."

Norris said the collector began acquiring French post-Impressionist and modern prints and posters, but soon found them too costly. So in the early 1960s, he started buying American Indian art. His first purchases were a carved Tlingit spoon made of carved horn that he bought for $11 at a junk shop in Levasy, Mo., and a Hopewell (Ohio Mound Builder) claw gorget of stone that he purchased for $20 from a trader in Lawrence.

"Like many collectors, he started with something he could afford and then that pushed him to higher levels," she said, adding that art collectors sometimes don't have the most stylish clothing or nicest houses because purchasing art is a higher priority in their lives.

Unlike many collectors who focus on objects of similar types, this private collection includes artworks from the Northwest Coast, the Southwest, the Plains, the New England forest area and Northern Mexico.

"The objects date from 100 A.D. to the 1980s, but most are before 1920," she said.

Items in the exhibition include:

• "Beabadge" effigy jar, 1205-1340. From the Casas Grandes in Northern Mexico, the clay pot appears to resemble a contented beaver or badger.
• Stepped-rim Kiva bowl, ca. 1820. The stepped-rim bowl of polychrome clay was used in Kivas, or Pueblo ceremonial structures.
• Socorro black-on-white jar, ca. 1150. The clay pot was made by the Anasazi, the forerunners of the Pueblo peoples.
• Woman's tableta, ca. 1900. The tableta, a painted wooden headdress, was worn during ceremonial dances at the Acoma Pueblo.
• Oil dish, ca. 1820-1840. The oil dish of carved wood and abalone shows two bears facing each other. The bears' bodies continue down the front and back and their feet are carved on the bottom of the dish. The dish held oil that was eaten with dried fish.
• A Crow cradle, ca. 1870. The cradle -- made of leather, trade cloth, muslin, Venetian glass beads, sinew, cotton thread and wood board -- comes from the collection of John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran who explored the Green and Colorado rivers and the Grand Canyon in 1869 and 1871.
• Prescription sticks from Prairie Potowatomie of Holton, 19th century. Prescriptions sticks were used by healers, who carved images of the plants employed for different healing processes on them as a means of remembering each treatment.
• Zuni ring, 1950s. The elaborate ring is made of silver and petitpoint turquoise.

-- Jan Biles' phone message number is 832-7146. Her e-mail address is jbiles@ljworld.com.

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