Robert Bruce Inverarity

Robert Bruce Inverarity, self-portrait, 1938. Robert Bruce Inverarity papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Robert Bruce Inverarity (July 5, 1909 – August 6, 1999) was an American artist, art educator, photographer, museum director, author, and anthropologist. He was the Washington State Director of the Federal Arts Project from 1936 to 1939 and the Washington Arts Project from 1939 to 1941, working with many noted Pacific Northwest artists. Fascinated with the Indian tribes of the Northwest from early youth, he amassed a major collection of North Pacific Coast Native art and authored several works on the subject.

As an artist he was best known for his woodblock and linocut printmaking, and for his photographs of artist friends such as Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Rockwell Kent, and Mark Tobey. He developed and directed the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, and the Philadelphia Maritime Museum.

Early life Robert Bruce Inverarity was born July 5, 1909, in Seattle, Washington, the son of Duncan George Inverarity and Rosalind Wallace Dunlop Inverarity. His father was a manager and promoter of the Northwest vaudevillean theater circuit, and was a prominent member of various Seattle civic and social organizations; he had also served as an assistant to photographer Edward S. Curtis on the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899.

The family lived in Canada during much of Bruce's youth, but moved back to Seattle when he was a teenager. From boyhood he had been interested in both art and Native American culture, and after graduating from Garfield High School in 1928

By age eighteen the blonde, six-and-a-half foot tall, pipe-smoking young artist had already achieved a degree of local notoriety. A 1928 newspaper profile described him as "one of the most unusual people in Seattle, no matter how you look at him. He's Seattle's youngest recognized artist. He's taking an active part in introducing 'modern art' to a city that knew him as a school boy." He later took over Tobey's position as a teacher at the Cornish School. He then spent a few years in California working as an artist and teacher, with his paintings and prints shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions. With American involvement in the Second World War, Inverarity served as the U.S. Navy's Chief of Design for Camouflage (1941–1943), and later as an official Navy war artist (1943–1945)

Combining his interests in art and anthropology, Inverarity became the founding director of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1949.