Objects as Cultural Ambassadors

In 1992, I spent a stormy evening at Maui Pomare's sheep ranch in the hills outside Wellington, New Zealand. Maui was the grandson of Sir Maui Pomare, whose book Legends of the Maori remains an important record of Polynesian historical traditions, folklore, and stories of old New Zealand.

The evening began with a long meal, served in the old English manner, with roast beef, wine, and fine family silver. Maui's wife, Helen, was a gracious host, and as the evening unfolded, Maui began showing me treasured family taonga.

Among them was a jade mere, said to have been carried on one of the first voyaging canoes to Aotearoa. He pulled it from beneath the sofa, and what followed was one of the most meaningful conversations I have ever had about art, ownership, culture, and responsibility.

At the time, I was building what would become one of the largest private collections of Māori material in private hands. So I asked Maui directly how he felt about a collector like myself acquiring and caring for these objects. He looked into the distance and paused for a while.

His answer stayed with me.

He told me that, in his view, I honored the culture by acquiring and preserving these taonga. He described them as cultural ambassadors: objects that could travel, teach, and carry the presence of a people far beyond their place of origin.

That conversation changed the way I understood collecting.

These objects were not simply works of art. They had cultural lives. They moved through families, communities, collections, museums, and exhibitions. They carried stories with them. They created encounters between people who might otherwise never have had access to the cultures that made them.

That responsibility led me to lend objects from my collection to museum exhibitions around the world. Over the years, pieces from the Blackburn collection appeared in many major exhibitions devoted to Polynesian art. Some remained on loan for years before returning home, having traveled far and carried their stories with them.

One of the most meaningful chapters came in 1999, when I helped establish a museum in Tonga in honor of the King's 80th birthday. For two years, much of the Blackburn Tongan collection was shown in the Kingdom.

I still remember the pleasure of seeing Tongan people encounter their own historic art. In many cases, art they had not seen in that form for generations. Within a day, carvers in the marketplace were once again responding to the real forms of Tongan art, not the simplified version often made for tourists.

That is what great objects can do. They preserve memory. They restore visual knowledge. They connect people to ancestry, craftsmanship, place, and history. When properly cared for, they do not become silent. They continue speaking.

Today, I still believe that serious collectors have a responsibility to care for objects with discipline, respect, and long vision. The finest pieces are not simply possessions. They are witnesses. They are carriers of culture. They are, in the truest sense, ambassadors.

Some of the remarkable objects I acquired decades ago are still with me. Each has its own story, and some have become part of my family's life. One Māori figure in the collection, affectionately known as George, was so present in our household that my young son used to feed it cookies and speak to it.

Years later, a major French collector offered several million dollars for the piece. My wife joked that there was our house on the beach in Hawaiʻi.

I said no.

That object will one day pass to my Polynesian son, Kuhane.

For me, this has always been the deeper meaning of collecting: not simply ownership, but stewardship. The object is cared for, studied, shared, and passed forward. When that happens, it continues its journey.

And sometimes, if we are lucky, we are only one chapter in its much longer cultural life.