It's February 1957, and the Museum of Primitive Art is unveiling its first ever exhibit.

At a glance, you might mistake the gallery for the Museum of Modern Art, which is just down the block.

Stark lighting, minimalist design, but the objects on display aren't modernist

sculptures. They're wooden masks from Nigeria, stone figures from the Aztecs, carvings from

Tahiti. The very term primitive art might seem backwards and racist, but that perception of

non-Western cultures as less developed

is exactly what this museum is fighting against.

This is the first time that non-Western art is being treated as art.

Something to be admired, not just studied.

The museum's founder, Nelson Rockefeller, tells the opening night crowd.

We do not want to establish primitive art as a separate kind of category,

but rather to integrate it into what is already known to the arts of man.

Our aim will always be to select objects whose rare quality is equal

of the work shown in

other museums of art throughout the world.

Listening in the audience is Nelson's 18-year-old son, Michael, the second youngest of the family's

five children, just a few minutes older than his twin sister Mary, and the most adventurous of the bunch by far.

These works are a window into a world totally unlike his own,

a place where art is everywhere, and everything is sacred.

Michael feels an inescapable pull toward this other world, to explore it, to understand it,

and ultimately to be fully consumed by it.

I'm Sarah Turney, and this is Disappearances, a Spotify original from Parcast.

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