A brief history of the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, from its founding in 1894, through various building additions, to its reopening on October 15, 2005, in an entirely new building designed by Herzog and de Meuron. De Young (1849-1925), a former publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, led the movement to create the original museum. The article focuses on the museum's African art collection, which lacked the large scale and classical works found in its Oceanic and American wings. With the aid of numerous scholars, most notably Professor Herbert M. "Skip" Cole, retired from University of California-Santa Barbara, the museum is slowly acquiring quality African artwork, such as an Ijo (Niger River Delta) shrine figure with seven heads and a Dogon (Mali) ancestral figure or deity (both pictured), that can be displayed thematically, rather than geographically.
