of the museum, who acquired many pieces over the course of three trips to Japan. Morse also helped raise interest in Japanese art in Massachusetts and New England: as Midori Oka states, Morse was "instrumental in influencing the area intellectuals and connoisseurs to turn their interests to Japanese art". Korean art The Peabody Essex Museum has approximately 1,800 pieces of Korean art in its collection, including ceramics, textiles, and painted screens. The collection began in 1883, as the result of a collaboration between museum director Edward Sylvester Morse and Korean scholar Yu Kil-chun, who was a member of the first official Korean delegation to the United States. Much of the collection consists of art of the Joseon Dynasty, which occupied the transitional period between the traditional Korean empire and modernity. Many of the pieces in the collection, particularly those from the Joseon period, display the centrality of art in the habits, rituals, and ceremonies of everyday Korean life. As former PEM curator Susan S. Bean observes, art objects were "essential to the conduct of social life because they conveyed values, fulfilled wishes, provided access to deities and ancestors, taught lessons and conferred prestige". Maritime art By the end of the 18th century, coinciding with the museum's 1799 founding, Salem was one of the nation's most prosperous seaports, and extensive trading of furs, spices, dyes, and other goods brought much wealth to the region. This long legacy of trade contributed greatly to the foundation and growth of PEM's maritime art collection, which is among the finest of its kind in the country. The collection includes over 50,000 objects, including paintings, model ships, scrimshaw, and more. Many diverse styles and periods of maritime art are on display in the collection, from navigational tools such as sextants to modern marine art, which addresses "nostalgic themes" and represents "the seafaring life of previous times". One significant feature of the currently installed collection is a recreation of a room in Cleopatra's Barge, an opulent yacht which was built by Salem's Crowninshield family and eventually became the royal yacht of King Kamehameha II. Native American art PEM's collection of Native American art includes over 20,000 objects, spanning a wide variety of tribal affiliations and time periods. The collection includes masks, textiles, jewelry, clothing, sculpture, and more, along with many pieces by contemporary Native American artists such as Frank Day and Kay WalkingStick. The origins of PEM's