About Scott McCue

McCue Tribal Art

My passion for non-western art began when I was a 15 year old student traveling in Mexico. At that time you could find, and return home with, incredible Pre-Columbian terracotta objects. (If only I had had more money and knowledge back then!). I visited many of the sites, and museums to understand the visual language of these past peoples. I went on to study Anthropology and Archaeology at Cal Berkeley, working with the collections in the Phoebe Hearst Museum and private collections in the Bay Area. I quickly became fascinated by the forms of objects that man has created including Neolithic tools, Egyptian art and the masks and objects that came from Africa, New Guinea and the Inuit people before contact with the west.

When I started my own business and art-photography studio, I continued to study, collect, buy and sell all types of Tribal Art, including: African, especially from Central and West Africa, New Guinea, and the Pacific along with Asian Art.

Over the past thirty years, my passion for tribal art has taken me around the world to visit collections and museums in Central America, Europe, and back home in the United States. I've developed an acute appreciation for the difference between an object created with the intent, energy and used by the culture behind it, as compared with one created for sale -- or to fool a collector. Not every old piece is a work of art. It takes a good eye and years of experience with good art to select the objects that rise above the ordinary.

Although I've admired and photographed fine works of contemporary art, I keep being drawn back to the Tribal arts. Their vibrancy, fantastic shapes, and subject matter fascinate me, and I deeply value the ritual and/or every day uses for which much of it was created.. I delight in the ways that people from different times and cultures communicate through the magic of these works, and how fine tribal art can enrich life and add energy to our existence. I prize and delight living with this art, and I offer the objects here in the hope of adding similar pleasure to your life.

Scott McCue