Mask (semese)
Papuan Gulf, Western Elema area, Kiri people
Cane or wicker framework, bark cloth, plant fiber, pigment, palm wood; 84 5/8 x 55 1/8 x 13 3/4 in. (215 x 140 x 35 cm)
The Field Museum, Chicago, Collected by A. B. Lewis 1912
via NYTimes:
Art Review | 'Coaxing the Spirits to Dance'
Works That Called Out to the Gods and Offered Them a Place to Dwell
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: October 27, 2006 {excerpts}
Helpful spirits, essential to the good life, didn’t come easily to the
clannish peoples of the Gulf of Papua. They had to be coaxed. And in
the coaxing lies the history of Papuan art, a religious pursuit
entirely devoted to making masks, figures and spirit boards for
habitation by the powerful local gods whose intervention was sought for
success in hunting, harvesting, warfare, trading and treating the sick.
How the Papuans practiced their beliefs on the remote Pacific
island of New Guinea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when
they still had little contact with the West, is the complex and
fascinating story told in "Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the
Papuan Gulf" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This exhibition of some 60 objects and 30 rare photographs of the works
on site or in actual use is the first comprehensive study of the
material, the Met says, since a pioneering survey in 1961 mounted by
the former Museum of Primitive Art in New York. The current show was
organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College,
in collaboration with the Met, and the New York presentation was put
together by Virginia-Lee Webb, the Met's research curator in the art of
Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
The art reflects the Papuan
social order, which was based on families, especially those whose
ancestry was identified with particular rivers and places. Each
family’s totemic emblems and legends spoke of its land and spiritual
heritage. The men in the society kept the traditions and made the art.
They lived in long houses, apart from their women and children (who
were forbidden to enter). The long houses, long huts with individual
cubicles, served as communal residences as well as performance halls
for the spirit-coaxing dances, and also provided a place for clan
shrines, maintained to preserve each family's tree.
The carved
and painted "spirit boards" made throughout the gulf region, on the
south coast of present-day Papua New Guinea, are probably the most
easily recognized of the area's traditional artworks. Each board was
meant to serve as a home for the rain forest or river deity embraced by
a particular clan. Their central designs, passed down from fathers to
sons and through marriages, typically represent a bush or river spirit,
with a heavily stylized face and perhaps a small body, surrounded by
various totemic symbols.
[...]
William G. Lawes (English, 1839–1907)
Young Men with Maiva Shields, 1881–89
Papuan Gulf, Port Moresby
Gelatin silver print; 5 7/8 x 8 in. (15 x 20.3 cm)
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
The show's many photographs depicting Papuan customs, habitats and
arts were mostly taken by the anthropologists and photographers who
visited the area as Christianity was beginning to take hold at the end
of the 19th century. More than a few depict objects in the show in
their original settings, like a cheerful Wapo spirit board that was
placed on pig skulls in a long-house shrine, snapped in 1930 by the
Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz.
The dean of Papua's
photographers, however, was an Australian, Frank Hurley (1885-1962),
best known for his images of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition
to the Antarctic in 1914. The first to use cinematography and aerial
photography in the Gulf of Papua, Mr. Hurley collected objects and
photographed places that no longer survive. His aerial view of Kaimari
villages on the Purari Delta in 1922, shot from about 1,500 feet, gives
a vivid idea of the territory and its watery byways.
[read full article]
W. Richard West Jr. the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and its public face throughout its planning and its first two years of operation, announced yesterday that he would leave next year.
