Fifteen years ago, the Sosland family helped rebrand Kansas City as a dynamic place for art through the gift of four giant &ldquo;Shuttlecocks&rdquo; sculptures to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.</p><p>Today, the museum is announcing another extraordinary Sosland gift.</p><p>A highlight of the new American Indian art galleries, opening Nov. 11, will be 34 rare and important objects of Northwest Coast art from the collection of Morton and Estelle Sosland. </p><p>The artworks, which include sculptural masks, intricately woven textiles and baskets, and exquisitely carved bowls and totem poles, are &ldquo;fundamental&rdquo; to the new installation, said Gaylord Torrence, the museum&rsquo;s curator of American Indian art. </p><p>&ldquo;We couldn&rsquo;t do it without this gift,&rdquo; Torrence said in a recent interview.</p><p>Although the museum declined to put a monetary value on the gift, it&rsquo;s believed the quality of the items would push their total worth well into the millions of dollars. </p><p>The Soslands have been important patrons of the Nelson for decades. Estelle Sosland was chairwoman of the museum&rsquo;s Board of Trustees during the 2007 opening of the Bloch Building and earlier served on various committees as a trustee. Morton Sosland is chairman emeritus of Sosland Publishing Co. and serves on the boards of the Sosland Foundation, the H&R Block Foundation and the Hall Family Foundation.</p><p> Featuring roughly 200 objects, the 6,100-square-foot American Indian installation is organized into eight culture areas tied to geographic regions.</p><p>The museum&rsquo;s holdings were weakest, Torrence said, in Northwest Coast objects &mdash; which the Soslands have avidly collected for 50 years.</p><p>It started with a headdress frontlet that Estelle Sosland saw at a New York gallery.</p><p>&ldquo;You have to come see this,&rdquo; she told her husband.</p><p>He did, and the two were hooked. </p><p>The term &ldquo;Northwest Coast art&rdquo; refers to works made by tribal peoples along the Pacific Ocean in an area stretching from Seattle to Alaska&rsquo;s southeast coast.</p><p>Distinguished by densely packed compositions of ovoid, circular and rectangular forms, the works are sculpturally and emotionally powerful.</p><p>In a recent interview at the couple&rsquo;s Country Club Plaza condominium, Morton Sosland described the designs, which often convey family stories and legends, as &ldquo;a form of writing.&rdquo; </p><p>&ldquo;Each clan had a different symbol,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that involved an animal, an insect or a bird.&rdquo; </p><p>Many Northwest Coast works combine human and animal elements, as seen in several key masterpieces of the Sosland gift. A mask from British Columbia representing the &ldquo;Wild Woman of the Woods&rdquo; incorporates bear fur and human hair. A Tlingit &ldquo;Swan Mask&rdquo; with abalone inlays, which would have glittered in a firelight performance, includes human ears behind its hinged beak.</p><p>&ldquo;It is about transformation, creatures changing, the inner spirit revealing itself,&rdquo; Torrence said.</p><p> Both masks are rare works that were once part of the collection of former Denver Art Museum curator Norman Feder (1930-95), a well-known scholar of American Indian art.</p><p> In the 1960s, when the Feder collection came up for sale, the Soslands bought all of it.</p><p>They later purchased important pieces from George Terasaki, a leading dealer and collector of Northwest Coast art. One of the most stunning works in their gift, a Chugach Eskimo &ldquo;Seal Bowl&rdquo; used to hold seal oil for dipping dried fish, came from Terasaki.