About Mark Blackburn
At 18, Mark Blackburn boarded a Pan Am flight in Los Angeles bound for Tahiti with a round-the-world ticket and money he'd made trading rare coins since he was fourteen. He never really came back.
Forty years later, he is one of the foremost private dealers and collectors of tribal and indigenous art in the world, the author of 8 books, a Senior Certified Appraiser, and the assembler of what has been called the finest private collection of Polynesian art ever put together. What followed was a life built entirely around the pursuit of extraordinary objects. The coins gave way to Oriental rugs, the rugs gave way to Polynesian art. He has logged countless miles across continents and auction rooms, mentored by giants in the field, among them Adrienne Kaeppler, Thor Heyerdahl, Edmund Carpenter, and Bill Holm, and built relationships with collectors, dealers, and institutions worldwide.
His collection of Polynesian art has been called the finest in private hands. Pieces from it have traveled to museums in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Tonga, and have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and the American Museum of Natural History. His book Polynesia (University of Hawaiʻi Press), with essays by Smithsonian curator Adrienne Kaeppler, won the Samuel M. Kamakau Award for Hawaiʻi Book of the Year.
He has served two terms as chair of both the Explorers Club, Hawaiʻi Chapter and the Asian Art Society of Hawaiʻi, and has led ethnographic field expeditions to some of the most remote island groups in the Pacific.
What drives him is the same thing that put him on that plane: a deep love of beauty, of objects, of the cultures that made them, and a need to understand why they matter.
Credentials
Senior Certified Appraiser. Appraisal commissions include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bishop Museum Honolulu, Honolulu Art Museum, Mission Houses Museum, and LACMA.
Press & Interviews
• Tribal Art Collector — Video Interview
• Hana Hou! — "The Collector” by Julia Porter Steele
• Art Dealer Diaries Ep. 19 — Dr. Mark Sublette
• Oceanic Art Society of Australia — "Mark Blackburn on Understanding Polynesian Art" by Robin Hodgson
Contact
Mark Blackburn Art
+1 (808) 517-7154