THE EXTENSIVE and historic tribal art collection currently housed in Colleton House, St Peter, is still up for grabs.
And its current owner is still holding out for a single buyer for the entire collection.
The 157 pieces of wooden art from Papua New Guinea and photographs from West Africa were once again on show for the public when the Barbados National Trust opened Colleton House, recently, as part of its Open House Programme.
“The collection is as it always has been, we haven’t sold it or any part of it at this point,” said owner Garry Burke.
He revealed that at one point the Barbadian Government had expressed an interest in purchasing the collection for the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, “but that didn’t eventuate for financial reasons”.
“We trying to keep it intact for one buyer because we think it is much more important as a collection than individual pieces,” he said, adding there were international buyers interested in the collection.
“We’d much rather keep it here because it means a lot more in Barbados than it would mean broken up in New York or somewhere like that, but it’s a matter of finding a buyer and no one’s appeared yet,” Burke said.
At last year’s showing of the property, respected historian and anthropologist Dr Lennox Honychurch had said it would be “tragic for the people of Barbados to lose the collection should its current home be sold and the collection distributed by the new owner”.
At the time, Dr Honychurch had opined the collection “would foster an understanding about the African patterns and traditions” and that international museums would go out of their way to acquire and curate such a collection.
