World Museum, Tulsa, OK (other)

Name:World Museum
Type:other
Street:1400 East Skelly Drive
City:Tulsa
State:OK
Zip:74105
country:USA
Phone:
Status:defunct

Description:
great mid-century modern building constructed in 1963 to house the collection of evangelist TL Osborn - had several shrunken heads and items from pacific islands and paupa new guinea

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/collectors-on-a-mission/

[ Edited by: stevekh 2016-04-20 20:07 ]

A great building, and a very nice article.

so, i've set up a meeting next week to visit with LaDonna Osborn, daughter of TL Osborn, the missionary that owned the World Museum in Tulsa - she is making available to me photos and the Christie's Auction catalogs from the sale of their collection for scanning - the auctions were held starting in 1981 and TL Osborn collected or was given as gifts many items from his mission trips including actual shrunken heads and PNG items (including the whole front of a hut from PNG)

pretty excited to get some good scans and share them with the TC community of the tiki history in this little patch of Oklahoma

http://thislandpress.com/2012/01/09/the-oddities-of-evangelism/

so here are a few smaller size photos of the pages from the Christie's Auction catalog from 1981 - i've marked the pages and they'll scan them and send to me - not a ton of images of the items, but lots of oceania stuff - also there's a link where i created a full size resolution pdf of all the pages i took photos of, as well as highlighted the auction estimates of the sections in photos in the back for those interested

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rDy0JG1uzX2C7uNRtGxDvMOWN_7tn-uv

A couple of things. About 1966 we went to a museum near Tulsa that was mainly Western art but among other things there were shrunken heads a lot of them looked like these. Also that 20th century Polynesian Type Tiki, #599 in the Christie's catalog, sure looks like it could be a Bumatay and he was from Hawaii.

On 2018-06-13 20:48, tikicoma wrote:
A couple of things. About 1966 we went to a museum near Tulsa that was mainly Western art but among other things there were shrunken heads a lot of them looked like these. Also that 20th century Polynesian Type Tiki, #599 in the Christie's catalog, sure looks like it could be a Bumatay and he was from Hawaii.

It would be interesting if that was a Bumatay - as far as the museum near Tulsa with shrunken heads - Woolaroc Museum in Bartlesville (about 45 miles north of Tulsa) has quite a few (this was the ranch/retreat of Frank Phillips, founder of Phillips Petroleum

Woolaroc that was it! Thanks Stevekh.

Stevekh, I'm wondering if some of the stuff from the auction of the World Museum may have been in a living estate sale I attended last month in Wichita, KS. The sale was for Jerry Martin, former museum director at Wichita State University, who had collected extensively in New Guinea. Martin mentioned to me he'd gotten at least one large piece from a Tulsa museum he said was started by a missionary and was long out of business. He didn't say if he'd gotten it at the auction or previously. I've attached a picture.

On 2018-09-16 21:50, tikijackalope wrote:
Stevekh, I'm wondering if some of the stuff from the auction of the World Museum may have been in a living estate sale I attended last month in Wichita, KS. The sale was for Jerry Martin, former museum director at Wichita State University, who had collected extensively in New Guinea. Martin mentioned to me he'd gotten at least one large piece from a Tulsa museum he said was started by a missionary and was long out of business. He didn't say if he'd gotten it at the auction or previously. I've attached a picture.

holy moly what a collection - just looked up the estate sale pics - the pic you posted wasn't in the catalog pics i took - i looked through and didn't see any that matched with the pics i have, but they could have been one in the collection - there weren't tons of pics in the auction catalog

here's link to the estate sale photos though
https://estatesales.org/estate-sales/ks/wichita/67212/stubbs-estates-art-ethnographica-estate-1557241/gallery

here's a recent score - brochure for the world museum