Many people may not be aware that the Carlos Museum has a small collection of 88 Oceanic objects. It has been on my list for quite some time to tackle the provenance of this material, but first I need to know exactly what we have in our collection. I started by examining each of the objects and taking quick photographs of the smaller pieces to add to the online records. Then, I went through the museum files to see what we think we know about each object and their donors. A few objects presented interesting research questions, but one really stood out because of its previous owner.
In 1995, the Carlos received a donation of a single wooden sculpture of a mother and child from a man in Buckhead named James E. Barnett. According to a statement written by Barnett at the time of donation, he had purchased the sculpture in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea in 1965. When I came across this statement in the files, I was curious to see if I could figure out, among other things, why Barnett had been in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s.
Turns out, Jim Barnett (1924–2004) was a fascinating character. Born in Oklahoma City, he attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate. While in Chicago, Barnett met professional wrestling promoter Fred Koch (1903–1969), and by the mid-1950s the two were partial owners of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). By 1965, the year the Carlos sculpture was purchased, Barnett was working in Oceania, where he had started Australia’s World Championship Wrestling.
In 1974, Barnett (and his sculpture) moved to Atlanta to resurrect Georgia Championship Wrestling. With the support of media magnate Ted Turner, Georgia Championship Wrestling became the first NWA-associated promotion to be broadcast on national television under Barnett’s tutelage. This set the model for the man who would buy Georgia Championship Wrestling in 1984–Vince McMahon. Barnett stayed on with McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF) for three years as vice-president. A falling out with McMahon in 1988 led Barnett to re-establish a professional relationship with Turner, and the two created World Championship Wrestling (WCW) as a rival to WWF. McMahon and WWF ultimately won the ratings battle and purchased WCW in 2001. Barnett returned to the fold as well and served as a consultant for WWF until his death.
I still have much to learn about the sculpture before we can have the conversation about whether this is something we should legally and ethically be caring for in our collection. But reading about Jim Barnett and his role in American professional wrestling was a fun research excursion for someone who attended WWF’s Monday Night Raw in the 1990s.
