Major U.S. museums initially presented South Asian and Indian art within broader archaeological, ethnographic, or “Oriental” collections before gradually establishing dedicated South Asian galleries. An important milestone came in 1919, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired and later permanently installed a monumental sixteenth-century South Indian Temple Hall, demonstrating that Indian architecture could be displayed as a major work of art rather than as isolated fragments. Over the following decades, institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago systematically expanded their South Asian collections and galleries. Meanwhile Avery Brundage’s donation of a pan-Asian collection—including an important corpus of Indian and Southeast Asian sculpture—led to the establishment of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, signaling a broader shift toward the sustained collecting and display of Indian art in American museums.
