54 Traditions Gallery

54 Traditions Gallery was founded by Mark Rapoport, a former New York pediatrician, and his wife after the couple relocated to Hanoi in the early 2000s and began collecting cultural artifacts from Vietnam's ethnic minority communities. It is now, by its own account, the only gallery in Vietnam dedicated specifically to the arts and material culture of the country's 54 officially recognized ethnic groups. Spread across three floors and seven themed rooms at 44B Hàng Bún Street in Hanoi's Ba Đình district, the collection includes tribal textiles and costumes, Buddhist statues, tribal jewelry, ceremonial swords, ritual scrolls, and ceramic pieces the gallery says were salvaged from centuries-old shipwrecks, alongside dedicated rooms on the Central Highlands and on shamanic tradition. The gallery offers free guided tours led by staff versed in the archaeological and cultural background of the pieces on display. According to the gallery, some of the Rapoports' original finds have since entered institutional collections, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Museum of Natural History, the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi.