Robert-Goldwater-Library

Spirit and Power in African Art

via the Goodwin-Ternbach Museum website:

Spirit and Power in African Art
Guest Curator, William Siegmann, Curator Emeritus, Dept. of African and Oceanic Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art

October 1 – December 15, 2007
Opening reception: Wednesday. October 3rd, 5:30-6:30 pm

This exhibition of over 100 objects from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries will comprise masks, figures, and ritual and practical objects.  Featured objects are made of wood, copper alloy, brass, bronze and ivory and come from regions throughout Africa such as Mali, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Zaire.

The objects are selected from the Godwin-Ternbach Museum’s permanent collection as well as that of the Queensborough Community College Art Gallery and will run concurrently with a special exhibition of Cameroon art www.qccartgallery.org on view at the Queensborough Community College Art Gallery.

Spirit and Power interprets each object’s aesthetic and social or religious significance and provides a compelling look at the influence and importance of African art in our current culture and economy.  Public programs will discuss these topics as well as the cross-currents of influence flowing between African and Western art.

Spirit and Power in African Art can be viewed from Monday through Thursday, 11 am – 7 pm and on Saturday from 11 am to 5 pm. Please note that the museum, located in Klapper Hall, Room 405, is not open on holidays and when the college is closed. Admission is free. For directions to Queens College, please visit: http://www.qc.cuny.edu/about/directions.php
                   
For further information about Spirit and Power in African Art and public lectures and tours associated   with this exhibition, call (718) 997-4747 or visit  www.qc.cuny.edu/godwin_ternbach.

Pictured above:
Kholuka mask. Wood, fiber, pigment
Yaka, Democratic Republic of the Congo
early to mid-20th c.
Gift of William Siegmann
Godwin-Ternbach Museum
[image source]

Andre Emmerich, art dealer and Precolumbian scholar

From the NYTimes, Sept. 26, 2007:

ANDRÉ EMMERICH, EMINENT ART DEALER, DIES AT 82
By Grace Glueck

André Emmerich, an influential Manhattan art dealer whose gallery was an early champion of the 1950s and ’60s school of Color Field painting and who also mounted important shows of pre-Columbian art, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.

His wife, Susanne, who confirmed the death, said he had had a stroke early this month.

Suave, erudite and faultlessly tailored, Mr. Emmerich presided over an extensive stable of American and European contemporary artists from 1954 to 1998, mounting elegant presentations in his pristine, understated uptown galleries, first on East 64th Street and then, from 1959 to 1998, in the Fuller Building on 57th Street ....

Always interested in the work of ancient peoples, Mr. Emmerich mounted insightful exhibitions of pre-Columbian art and classical antiquities. He became an authority on pre-Columbian art, lecturing and writing two books on the subject: “Art Before Columbus” (1963), and “Sweat of the Sun and Tears of the Moon — Gold and Silver in Pre-Columbian Art” (1965), a scholarly survey. He stopped showing the work because of increasing export restrictions.

In 1996, Mr. Emmerich sold his gallery to Sotheby’s but continued to direct it. After a run of 45 years, however, it was closed by Sotheby’s in 1998.

Mr. Emmerich had recently worked on an autobiography, “My Life With Art,” excerpts of which have been published in Art News, The Wall Street Journal and The New Criterion ...

(Read full article here)

Susan Vogel on the musée du quai Branly

This Friday, September 28, Susan Vogel, Professor, Department of Art History, Columbia University, will deliver a lecture entitled Shadows on the Seine: African Art, Darkness, and the Quai Branly Museum.

The lecture, which begins at 4:00 p.m., will be held at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts as a part of its Graduate Student Association's Daniel H. Silverberg Lectures in the Fine Arts. Admission is free, and the public is cordially invited to attend.

Institute of Fine Arts
One East 78th Street
New York NY 10075
tel: (212) 992-5800

Photo source

Aboriginal art under threat

Concern … Harriet Fesq, co-ordinator of the Durrmu Arts centre, with some of the art at the Chalkhorse Gallery in Surry Hills.
Photo: Adam Mclean

from The Sydney Morning Herald, via Harvard Law School Art Law resources [links courtesy of RGL]:

Aboriginal art under threat
Stephanie Peatling and Joel Gibson
September 17, 2007

THE [Australian] Federal Government's intervention in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory could devastate a lucrative industry and leave artists open to exploitation by carpet-baggers, leading indigenous art academics and artists' representatives say.

They want to keep the Community Development Employment Project, which is being scrapped as part of the intervention, because the industry depends on it to support art centres and workers who do not earn enough to live on from inconsistent art sales.

Jon Altman, the director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University, said ending the program was likely to "jeopardise" the most successful indigenous industry.

"Why would you undermine the most robust sector? [Art] is a huge drawcard for international tourists and has enormous spin-off benefits for the nation," Professor Altman said.

As part of the intervention into Northern Territory remote communities, indigenous people will have up to half of their welfare payments quarantined by the Federal Government.

But employment project payments cannot be quarantined because they are technically income. People receiving these payments will be moved to the lower unemployment payments, which are subject to quarantining, and receive top-ups to cover the difference.

The Minister for Workforce Participation, Sharman Stone, told the Herald all art centres in the Northern Territory would be visited by departmental staff to see if some of their staff could be employed by the public service.

"If there are artists who are able to sell their work and they are doing well they should be self-sufficient and they should be assisted to manage their income," Dr Stone said.

Richard Birrinbirrin, a Ramingining artist and one of the producers of the AFI-award-winning film Ten Canoes, said: "Nearly all of our art centre workers and artists rely on CDEP payments, which have supported jobs in art centres for the past 20 years. Due to years of under-funding of indigenous education, many of our people are not job-ready and some never will be. They do have meaningful work, though: their job is the expression and teaching of our culture. They are artists."

Alan Murn, the manager of Julalikari Arts, said that moving artists to the work-for-the-dole scheme would require them to perform menial jobs such as cleaning communities instead of painting, and would reduce their base pay rate, making them more vulnerable to carpet-baggers.

Professor Altman agreed, saying that if artists were working in other areas as part of the work-for-the-dole scheme they would be susceptible to carpet-baggers coming into communities and offering cash for artworks.

A recent Senate report on the indigenous art industry warned about carpet-baggers, finding it was common practice for Aboriginal artists to be offered small amounts of instant cash for their paintings, much less than they would receive if the paintings were sold through an art centre or gallery.

Harriet Fesq, co-ordinator of the Durrmu Arts centre in Peppimenarti, said that community was protected from carpet-baggers by its remoteness but the end of employment project payments would affect the industry across the Territory.

"It's a fragile thing, having an art program and ensuring the artists are happy and comfortable so they can produce good work."

Makonde masquerade @ Wallach Art Gallery

Mapiko dancer entering a village accompanied by a lipalipanda player. Matambalale Village, Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique. Photograph by A. Bortolot, 2004.





Revolutions: A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique, an exhibition of masks and other performance objects from East Africa, will be on view at the Columbia University Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery from 19 September through 8 December 2007.

The exhibition features more than 60 examples of Makonde art, on loan from public and private collections, including a comprehensive selection of masks, figural statuary, puppets, drums, dance scepters, and ornate metal bracelets dating from the late 1800s to the present day.

Alexander Bortolot, a doctoral candidate in art history and archeology at Columbia University -- and a former graduate intern in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- is the curator of the exhibit and author of the forthcoming accompanying catalog. In addition to the curatorial essay based on Bortolot's research, the publication will include more than 60 color images that provide a rare record of Makonde visual culture.

Alex will deliver a gallery talk on Thursday, 25 October, at 6:30 p.m.

Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
826 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University (campus map)
Gallery hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 1 - 5 pm.

• Exhibition description (pdf)

• Search "Makonde"

More Recent Returns: Sitting Bull Relics

Ernie LaPointe at Deer Medicine Rocks, Montana  near  where his great grandfather had his vision of soldiers falling upside down into camp  -- photo courtesy Serle Chapman [Link]


via NYTimes:

Smithsonian Returns Sitting Bull Relics
in: Arts, Briefly, 9/18/07
Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

A lock of hair and wool leggings belonging to Sitting Bull, leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, are to be returned by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to his closest living relatives. In an announcement yesterday, the museum said that after Sitting Bull was killed in 1890 while being arrested by tribal police, his body was in temporary possession of Horace Deeble, an Army doctor at the Fort Yates military post in North Dakota, who obtained the hair and leggings from the body and sent them to the museum in 1896. The return of the hair and leggings was requested by Ernie LaPointe, Sitting Bull’s great-grandson and a representative of the four known living great-grandchildren. The museum's Repatriation Office operates under legislation that requires the return of certain remains and objects to lineal descendants and federally recognized Indian tribes.

Yale Officials Agree to Return Peruvian Artifacts

Photo: Michael McDonough

via nytimes.com:

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: September 17, 2007

After a long standoff with the government of Peru, Yale University has agreed to return a large group of artifacts that were excavated at Machu Picchu in a historic dig by a Yale explorer in 1912 and that Peru contends were merely on loan and should have been returned long ago.

For several years Yale had argued that it had returned all borrowed objects in the 1920s, retaining only those to which it had full title. Yale proposed dividing possession of the artifacts. But negotiations between the university and the administration of President Alejandro Toledo, who was in power from 2001 until July 2006, broke down, and Peru threatened last year to go to court.

On Friday night Yale officials and a Peruvian delegation that traveled to New Haven signed a preliminary agreement that would return title to Peru of more than 350 artifacts — ceramics and metal and stone objects — that are considered to be of museum quality and several thousand fragments, bones and other objects considered to be primarily of interest to researchers.

The agreement, which establishes an extensive collaborative relationship between Yale and Peru, provides for an international traveling exhibition. Admission fees will be used to help build a new museum and research center in Cuzco, the city closest to Machu Picchu. The museum, for which Yale will serve as adviser, is expected to be completed in 2010.

Some of the research-quality artifacts will remain at Yale, while others will be returned, though legal title to all the items will be held by Peru. Yale will also contribute what one university official called a “significant” amount of money to establish a program of scholarly exchanges that will continue for at least three years.

“We aim to create a new model for resolving competing interests in cultural property,” Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, said yesterday about the agreement. “This can best be achieved by building a collaborative relationship — one which involves scholars and researchers from Yale and Peru — that serves science and human understanding.” [read full story]

Read the joint statement by the Government of Peru and Yale University

Our earlier posts:

Yale Bingham collection dispute yields an agreement 8/16/07
Dispute continues over Bingham's Machu Picchu finds 6/25/07
Inca Show Pits Yale Against Peru 2/1/06

Apocalypto: the reviews are still coming in

Photo source

Short takes in this month's Anthropology News (September 2007):

Apocalypto in Cobá
Robey Callahan
The local views of the Hollywood presentation of the Maya may not make comfortable reading, but the fact remains that the only outsiders who get the thumbs up in Cobá are anthropologists and Mel Gibson. 

Gibson's Apocalypto as an Act Against the Maya
Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli
Mel Gibson' s film goes to great strides to appear accurate, and in so doing endangers recent advances the Maya have made to overcome some of the still-felt consequences of conquest and colonization.

Unfortunately these articles are not (yet) available on the the Web.

• When first we heard about it (our blog post).
  

         

New Director at National Museum of the American Indian

via washingtonpost.com

Former Interior Official To Lead Indian Museum

By Jacqueline Trescott and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; Page C01

The Smithsonian Institution yesterday named Kevin Gover, a lawyer and former Interior Department official with no museum experience, to succeed W. Richard West as director of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Gover, an Oklahoma Pawnee and former assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Interior Department, is a former law partner of West, the museum's founding director. His office at Interior oversaw the Bureau of Indian Affairs, historically one of the most contentious agencies in the federal government.

For the past four years, Gover has been a professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in Tempe.

"I came to this decision rather slowly. I knew the museum was looking for a director and I was one of the people who wondered who could replace Rick. But I got more and more interested. A key factor is that it is a glorious building with wonderful exhibits and collections. The basic things you need for a good museum are already there," Gover said. [read full story]

Museum press release (pdf)

[image source]

NEW ARRIVALS @ The Goldwater Library, no.60

A list of newly arrived books at the Goldwater Library will be posted bi-monthly as an easily downloadable text file. Here is the list for Summer 2007:

Download newarrivals-no_60_Summer2007.txt