Mathers Museum of World Cultures

Founded in 1963, Mathers Museum of World Culture museum based at the Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Before opening its doors, the university has been exhibiting the work for 20 twenty years. The museum was created under the directorship of Wesley R. Hurt. It has a collection of over 30,000 objects and 10,000 photographs representing cultures from each of the world's inhabited continents. These materials have been collected and curated to serve the museum's primary mission as a teaching museum within a university setting. The ethnology collections strengths include traditional music instruments, photographs of Native Americans and the Bloomington community, Inupiaq and Yupik Eskimo materials, and Pawnee material culture, among others.

The museum is home to vast collections of African materials consisting of 2 900 pieces representing countries throughout West, East, and Central Africa. The strongest collections come from the Tetela of eastern Zaire, obtained by John White in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Hausa and Yoruba of Nigeria, collected by Arnold Rubin, former professor of Art History at UCLA, the Hausa of Nigeria, collected by renowned art historian Roy Sieber and a large number of musical instruments collected throughout Africa by pioneering ethnomusicologist, Laura Boulton.