Robert-Goldwater-Library

London Rarrk

Works by Timothy Wulanjbirr (left) and John Mawurndjul in "Rarrk London" at Bargehouse on London's South Bank 

via Artnet Magazine, 10-11-07, + additional linkage provided by RGL:

ABORIGINAL LONDON
by Ben Street

"Rarrk London," Sept. 21-Oct. 7, 2007, at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank SE1 London  

On the surface, Aboriginal Australian art is easily understood as a special kind of ethnic abstraction that offers both formalist invention and a spiritual component, qualities that are, unsurprisingly, also found in abstract art in the West. "Rarrk London" -- the word "rarrk" refers to crosshatching -- recently brought more than 100 works by about 15 artists from Western Arnhem Land in Australia to the Bargehouse on London's South Bank, only a short walk away from Tate Modern. The exhibition was organized by Josh Lilley Fine Art, a gallery founded a year ago, in cooperation with Maningrida Arts and Culture.

Lilley has used the Bargehouse's sprawling industrial spaces to good advantage. With its weathered steel beams and blisters of paint, the building is suited to avant-garde art production, and discreetly if ironically articulates Lilley's stated aim to "bring contemporary Aboriginal Australian art in line with other contemporary art shows in London." Spread over four floors of this vast riverside warehouse, spotlighted or aglow with natural daylight, the bark paintings and spindly figurative sculptures reacted to the space and each other in a pointedly "fine art" way.

Interestingly enough, despite the respect that most of us give to indigenous art forms, their presentation can still carry a certain sense of disenfranchisement. In "Rarrk London," this "outsider effect" is verbalized in the show's documentary (shown as part of the exhibition), in which dealers and journalists alike voice their bewilderment at the lack of critical support for the work, and promise that a renaissance is just around the corner. Here, hope seems to lie in one man, John Mawurndjul, a kind of Luke Skywalker of Aboriginal art, whose steady rise to prominence -- and steadily rising prices -- this show presumably will quicken. (Mawurndjul's work sells for as much as £24,000; other works in the show begin at about £1,500.)

Mawurndjul occupies an odd position in contemporary art. On the one hand, he's been the subject of a major retrospective at Basel's Museum Tinguely and made a huge installation at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. On the other, he makes art according to an age-old process of stripping bark from trees, fire-treating it, and painting its smooth interior with highly elaborate abstract patterns. One day he's posing for the cover of Time magazine, and the next he's back in his Arnhem Land outstation home amid the swirling dust and sluggish rivers. Mawurndjul is an apt reflection of the liminal status of Aboriginal art, and his work -- and that of his contemporaries also shown here, including Samuel Namunjdja, Timothy Wulanjbirr and Kay Lindjuwanga -- plays out this position with often fascinating results.

An initial look at works such as Mawurndjul's Mirelk Site (2007), an apparently abstract painting on an oblong slice of stringybark, reveals certain formal echoes of the tropes of Western abstraction. Bands of minute crosshatched lines in natural ochre pigment (the Rarrk technique originates in body painting) fill the inner surface of the bark, with waves of thinner white and black lines running across it in a distorted grid, like an Agnes Martin reflected in rippling water. The sinuous lines of the grid -- and the fine mesh of the Rarrk lines -- reveal an acceptance, even an elaboration, of the uneven surface of the ground. Natural variations in the hues allow the painting to pulse with subtle tonal relationships. It's as discreetly expressive as an Eva Hesse drawing, allowing the discontinuities of the medium to evoke a sense of organic presence.

Owen Yalandja's Yawkyawks in "Rarrk London" at Bargehouse on London's South Bank

The dispute* that followed the 1984 exhibition, "Primitivism in 20th Century Art," warned us against interpretation of the sort that rips objects from their native context for contemplation within the museum -- but times have changed, at least in this particular region. Aboriginal bark painting was responsive to market forces as soon as their presence was felt, and now, in fact, art from Western Arnhem Land has echoed the teleological narrative of Western art history, moving away from a naïve, spaceless figuration towards an allover abstraction immediately reminiscent of post-war American painting. A sense of primitive craft remains, however, and gives the works their own distinction: undulating away from the wall, Marundjul's pieces play against the flatness of Western abstraction, yearning away from the white cube with a sort of homesickness.

It is in this sense that the bark paintings acquire their political dimension as esthetic declarations of land ownership and cultural preservation. Every material used -- from the fire-treated bark to the ochre pigments and delek, the white clay used to create the circular elements in Mawurndjul's Milmilngkan Site (2007) -- derives from the artists' immediate geographical surroundings. Even the titles refer to specific locations; form, material and meaning are so tightly interwoven that they acquire a kind of conceptual integrity. But it's in their neither-here-nor-there identity that the most successful works acquire a resonance that goes beyond the "ethnographic" bracket. Their awkwardness is something to be celebrated.

 

BEN STREET is a teacher, lecturer and critic living in London.

* See Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: '"Primitivism"' in Twentieth-Century Art' at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984", Artforum (Nov. 1984), and the subsequent exchange of polemical letters in Artforum, (Feb. and May 1985) between MoMA curators (William Rubin + Kirk Varnedoe) and Thomas McEvilley. This material was eventually republished in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, Bill Beckley, ed. Allworth Press, New York, 1998.

Latest in Aboriginal Art Flap: Carpet-Bagging?

Journalists say that Tommy Watson has been duped out of thousands of dollars on the sale of works such as Pitjantjatjara, 2005 - claims the Red Sand Art Gallery denies



via The Art Newspaper; additional links courtesy of RGL:

Aboriginal art dealers fight back
Red Sand Art Gallery sues journalists who accuse them of defrauding indigenous artists
James MacDonald | 9.10.07 | Issue 184

In mid July in the massive modernist Supreme Court in Darwin, a frail Aboriginal man with a shock of grizzled white hair and beard took the witness stand to give evidence in a case that goes to the heart of alleged "carpet-bagging"-dealers exploiting indigenous artists to make a profit-in the country's booming indigenous art trade.

Tommy Watson , who only began painting five years ago, is one of the new stars of the Aboriginal art world; his 2006 work Waltitjatta sold for A$240,000 ($197,160) at a sale in May held by Lawson Menzies auctioneers in Sydney-an ­auction that also saw the first Aboriginal painting break the A$1m ($840,000) price barrier, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Earth's Creation.

Watson is also one of eight indigenous artists from Australia whose work is included in the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum in Paris dedicated
to the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
The case has been brought to the Northern Territory Supreme Court by Red Sand Art Gallery and its proprietors Peter and Nathan King, who are seeking damages for alleged defamation in two magazine articles.

According to their counsel, Paul Heyward-Smith QC, the articles invited ­readers to consider them as "carpet-baggers" exploiting Watson.

The defendants are Alison Harper, a former director of what was then Phillips Fine Art in Australia, who publishes the quarterly Australian Art Market Report, and journalist Jeremy Eccles, who wrote two articles in Harper's magazine in late 2005 and early 2006.

The defendants claim truth, fair comment and qualified privilege.

Tommy Watson was appearing as a witness for the defendants. Born around 1935 in the desert of central Australia, Watson cannot read or write, and speaks only a smattering of English.

He moves between Irrunytya, a small community of 150 people described as "one of the most impoverished places on earth" and the town of Alice Springs, a day's drive away.

Speaking through an interpreter in his native Pitjantjatjara language, Watson told the court of his dealings with the Red Sand Art Gallery in Alice Springs in 2005 when his paintings started attracting attention from collectors.

"I brought a lot of paintings in and I gave [them] to some mob and they didn't pay me," he said.

Watson supplied the gallery with 41 paintings over four months, but how much money changed hands and how it was distributed is still to be established.

Legal searches found that Watson's niece had received A$61,000 ($50,100) in cash and second-hand cars on his behalf, and the gallery later showed the court receipts showing that it had paid a further A$11,000 ($9,200) for used vehicles.

At the time his paintings were selling for over A$30,000 ($24,650) each.

The gallery began ­placing the works with auction houses in Sydney and Melbourne; to date they have realised A$347,300 ($285,300) for 20 works sold so far and are likely to make around A$844,700 ($693,920) when all are auctioned, according to Adrian Newstead, head of indigenous art at Lawson Menzies. [read on...]

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."

Art From Tribal Cultures: Summer in Chelsea

Marada Figure, New Ireland, Tabar Island, side view (detail).
Photo: Betty Cunningham Gallery.

via NYTimes:
Art in Review
Published: July 6, 2007

IT’S ALL SPIRITUAL
Art From Tribal Cultures
Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25th Street, Chelsea
Through July 27

HOLLAND COTTER

For its summer group show, Cuningham Gallery has set aside contemporary art in favor of what looks like a telescoped version of last spring’s Tribal and Textile Arts Fair. In this case all of the work, whether for sale or on loan for the occasion, has been selected by a single New York dealer, Alan Steele. Installed in natural light in a white-box space, it adds up to a forceful ensemble. Chelsea doesn’t often offer such sights — old art that looks considerably fresher than a lot of new art — and it could use more.

And the show could use some focus. The “tribal cultures” represented are from all over the map: Africa, Oceania, Asia and North and South America. The work encompasses a broad range of materials and meanings. But instead of using function or place of origin as an organizing principle, Mr. Steele goes for the vaguer categories of formal affinity and all-purpose spirituality.

General physical resemblance is sufficient reason for displaying a Nepalese shrine figure, an Easter Island ancestor figure and a carved Tlingit dagger together: all are small, slender, vertical and figurative. And spirituality, whatever its meaning, is accepted as a natural bond between visually and culturally disparate things: between, say, a classic Fang reliquary figure from Gabon, looking like a muscle-bound baby, and a Mimbres bowl from New Mexico, its suave abstract designs like millennium-old Art Deco; or between a Taoist ritual mask shrouded in strips of calligraphy-covered rice paper and a swatch of Tahitian mulberry bark cloth ornamented with delicate nature images.

Was the Polynesian cloth made to be worn on the body or hung on the wall? What ritual purpose did the Chinese mask serve, and what does the writing on the paper mean? Does “spiritual” mean the same thing when applied to these two objects or to a Fiji war club or an Ethiopian carving platter?

The show’s response to all of this is in its title and is symptomatic of an outdated approach to exhibiting non-Western art. This approach has made a comeback in the hazy, lazy Postmodernist — which is to say Modernist — 2000s: no context, no explanations; just beauty, our way.

But do we still need to be persuaded of the beauty and spirituality of “tribal” art? No. Do we still need to learn why “tribal” and “spiritual” are spurious categories, and how the objects defined by them turn the modern Western concept of art itself on its head? Yes.

I urge you to visit “It’s All Spiritual” for its extreme beauties, and I encourage you to bring the questions the show doesn’t ask.

Phantom Shields

via Artnet, 6-28-07:

Phantom Shield
New Guinea
Banz area, Western Highlands
ca, 1960-80s
Cavin-Morris

POP TRIBAL
by N.F. Karlins

During this year’s Tribal Art Fair, a new category of art emerged -- "Pop Tribal." From the Central Highlands of the main island of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific came large wooden fighting shields emblazoned with Lee Falk's comic book hero, the Phantom.

The buff-bodied Phantom appeared on shields dating from the 1960s to the 1980s at several booths. The comic books they were based on may have arrived in New Guinea as early as the 1940s during WWII, where the Japanese and the United States fought along the coast, eventually making their way to the interior.

Though startling at first, it makes sense that a warrior (whose tribe already used masks) would adopt as his alter-ego a masked crusader who would never die.

Art from Papua New Guinea is as varied as the thousands of tribes scattered over the eastern half of the main island (the western half belongs to Indonesia) and its surrounding islands. Art from these regions has been prized for years.

But the peoples in the rugged interior valleys of highland New Guinea were isolated from the modern world the longest. They remained as they were for thousands of years, with fighting between tribes as a way of life. Colonial contact was made in the 1930s, and the highlands produced its first literate generation in the 1970s.

While other areas of New Guinea produced more carved figures, the highlands, focused on war, spent more energy on creating tattoos and body decorations that would increase their warriors' powers and on large fighting shields.

Whether or not you saw the Phantom shields at the Fair, one of the dealers there, Cavin-Morris, is presenting several Phantom shields within a larger show of art from central New Guinea at its Chelsea gallery at 210 Eleventh Avenue. That exhibition, "Geometrics of Aggression: Shields of the New Guinea Highlands," May 17-July 13, 2007, offers a far-ranging look at art from this little-known region.

Fighting shields were traditionally made from the trunk of the "tapi" tree, which was split, smoothed and painted. In the Wahgi Valley of the Western Highlands, typically shields had a circle representing the sun in the center and designs were "punctuated," or outlined in small holes. The Phantom shields appeared in this region painted in enamel over traditional designs.

Cavin-Morris has a fine display of these more traditional shields, along with smaller underarm shields from the Southern Highlands, carved pipes, gourd masks and a terrific lichen mask as well as stone ceremonial bowls that go back to the Neolithic (1000 BC).

A set of 12 arrows with tips made from the bones of human ancestors were considered very potent. Each was intended for a specific victim (male or female) and caused a particular kind of death (fast or slow through septicemia). They differ in shape and color.

A rare dance figure of carved wood decorated with feathers, shell, bone, pigment and woven fiber bands on the arms and legs looks eerie and is an absolutely wonderful piece of mixed media. It’s already sold, but there are still Phantom shields available for under $8,000.

A "Moka Kina," or pectoral, was displayed during a festival when hundreds of pigs were killed, roasted and eaten. A pearl shell is set into a circle of resin on wood with bamboo tally sticks in a row, with each stick counting as one pig. Only the wealthy could afford such a luxury adornment.

A pig-killing skirt was another prestige item. More like a girdle than a skirt, the woven and painted fiber wrapped around the torso. From this were suspended various woven strands with tufts at the ends that would swish with movement.

More enigmatic are the flat woven-fiber human or animal forms with holes in the head and navel, areas which are prominent in the wooden spirit boards from the southern coastal area of New Guinea, too. These "Timbuwarra" figures are earth spirits, appropriately painted in bands of earth colors. They were made by elder men in times of disaster, such as wide-spread disease, earthquakes or famine. Moved to the Spirit House and used for rituals, they were buried later to refertilize the earth.

I have read of men wearing them on their heads during fertility rites. Whatever other uses they may have had, their forms are visually striking and their palettes different from those used in other works.

"Melanesia" at Pace Primitive, installation view

For fans of New Guinea art, spring offered two other exhibitions in New York that featured excellent material from other parts of the region. Masterpieces from the more studied northern coastal areas around the Sepik River were featured in "Melanesia," which was on view May 11-June 16, 2007, at Pace Primitive.

The southern coast is the subject of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, "Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf," Oct. 24, 2006-Dec. 2, 2007, a long term show mounted while the Met's Oceanic Galleries are closed for renovation.

N.F. KARLINS is a New York critic and art historian.

African Vision vs. Material Journeys...

Photograph by Franko Khoury
A mask from Côte d'Ivoire from the late 19th to mid-20th century.

via NYTimes, Art:
Out of Africa, Eclectic Visions
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: June 1, 200

African art has it all: beauty, brio, inventiveness, moral gravity, emotional depth, practicality, sensuality and humor. It’s hot and cool, high and low, chastening and consoling, endlessly varied, surprising always.

So why do our big museums still give us so few African shows? And why, when they do, are those shows so often packaged the same way? Third-tier Western artists get solo retrospectives; entire African cultures are squeezed into art-of-a-continent surveys.

Many such surveys are collection samplers, the only thematic thread being the taste or money of a single owner or institution. They are at least as much about the Western market as about African art. And given the present sluggish cultural climate, this model probably won’t change soon. So it’s important to keep asking why something knowledge-advancing can’t be done with the survey format. Two current collection shows, one in Washington and one in Boston, answer the question in very different ways.

“African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection” at the National Museum of African Art in Washington is made up of 88 traditional sculptures and masks from the several hundred acquired by the New York real estate developer Paul Tishman and his wife, Ruth, from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The Tishman collection was widely exhibited in those decades. A generation of art historians grew up with it. A canon of “classical” African art was in part shaped by it. In 1982 the Tishmans sold the material to the Walt Disney Company, thinking it would find a permanent home in an African pavilion at Epcot in Florida. The pavilion was never built. Two years ago Disney gave the bulk of the collection — certain outstanding objects had already been dispersed — to the National Museum of African Art.

With more than 500 works, the gift is exceptionally large. It is also very uneven. But where it’s great, it’s great. “African Vision” is about greatness. It presents itself as a “masterpiece” show: clean installation, scant information, one stand-alone treasure after another. [read on...]

Photo: Franko Khoury/National Museum of African Art

A post (early to mid-20th century), made of wood, pigment and cloth, from the Walt Disney-Tishman collection at the National Museum of African Art in Washington

[...]
A second exhibition, “Material Journeys: Collecting African and Oceanic Art, 1945-2000: Selections From the Geneviève McMillan Collection” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, takes the opposite tack. It has its textbook sculptures and de rigueur masks, but lots of unclassical, uncategorizable, unglamorous things too: door locks, drums, jewelry, head-bashers, splashboards and hats, side by side, as in a bazaar.

The show not only acknowledges the market’s role in collecting, but takes commerce as its theme, in an installation that follows the itinerary of one avid shopper on a half-century buying spree.

Geneviève McMillan was born in France and educated in Paris, where she developed an interest in African culture and where she did a little buying. A Kota reliquary figure she picked up there opens the show. She married an American and moved to the United States in 1946. They made their home in Cambridge, Mass. (where she still lives), but she kept traveling.

She made repeated trips to the South Pacific, even more to Africa, where she sought out dealers and artists and sorted through markets in Dakar, Monrovia, Abidjan, Accra and Kinshasa. The show, which is accompanied by a fascinating book by Christraud M. Geary, the museum’s curator of African and Oceanic art, moves along with her through the decades, supplementing art with a display of travel ephemera — posters, airline schedules, stamps — and the diary in which Mrs. McMillan kept track of what she bought, when and where. [read on...]

New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show

Photo: Cary Conover for The New York Times
The New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show opened at the Seventh Regiment Armory.

via NYTimes Art Review:
New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show
Global Art: Talismans, a Phantom and a King
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: May 21, 2007

You think art fairs aren’t sexy? The New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show is out to prove you wrong. Just inside the entrance to the Seventh Regiment Armory’s drill hall you’ll find a peppery display of Burmese pornographic drawings. And smack in the middle of the show, bristling like a cactus garden, is a cluster of carved-wood Thai phalluses.

No need to call the vice squad. All this stuff is religious or folk-religious. The sculptures and drawings were created a century or so ago as talismans to ensure prosperity, fertility and supernatural protection. It is said that they can even perform miracles, like warding off bullets and turning ho-hum you and me into Ms. and Mr. Irresistible.

These forceful items are part of a special display organized by Chinalai Tribal Antiquities, a gallery in Shoreham, N.Y., for a fair that has more than a few irresistible features of its own. The wide-open space at the armory, suitable for tanks and tennis, imposes the same regimental format on every fair that appears there: booth beside booth, aisle after aisle. But this show has a look of its own, in part because it is the only tribal fair in town, which seems odd, given that New York is, among other things, an African-American city with a significant African population, a Latino city that grows more Latino by the day and an Asia outside Asia.

As for textiles, where else, even taking the Metropolitan Museum into account, can you lay eyes on the range you see here? [read on...]

Film and History in the Pacific Workshop

Film and History in the Pacific

 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
A Workshop at The Australian National University, Canberra
6-8 February 2008

This workshop explores two questions: how has film shaped Pacific history and understandings of Pacific pasts? and how do – or might – Pacific historians engage with the medium of film? Although film in the Pacific dates back to the late 19th century and is now increasingly the medium through which Pacific pasts are encountered by both Pacific and local audiences, Pacific historians (with a few notable exceptions) have rarely engaged with film and even fewer have been directly involved with film production.

Four themes will guide the workshop:

    * Film, frontiers and imperialism – how film has been used to document Pacific frontiers and advance or oppose imperial interests;
    * War and identity – cinematic portrayals of war and their formative effects on local and metropolitan identities;
    * Islanders and others – representations in film of, by and for Islanders and the depiction of minority groups in the Pacific;
    * Pacific pasts and history through film – on the use of film as a source material; as an approach to researching and representing history; and as a means of communicating to audiences.

Presentations on this last theme will especially serve postgraduate students, filmmakers and historians who have pioneered the use of film or wish to make greater use of it; and teachers and academics guiding and assessing students who want to use film in their research or theses.

A program of screenings is planned in association with the workshop and participants will have the opportunity to visit film repositories in Canberra.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts (no more than 200 words) is 31st May 2007. Please forward abstracts and any inquiries to the convenors chris.ballard(at)anu.edu.au or Vicki Luker vicki.luker(at)anu.edu.au.

Attendance is open to all and registration is free, thanks to the support of the Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU.

MMA SYMPOSIUM: Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf

SYMPOSIUM
Sunday, May 20, 2007

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance:
Art of the Papuan Gulf

Noted scholars present a series of lectures about the traditional sculpture of the Papuan Gulf and the photographs that chronicle it. Topics include new discoveries about the Museum’s rare photographs, the ways in which these images form visual biographies of the objects,
and how they expand our knowledge of the history of art and photography in the Pacific.

LECTURES

10:30    Welcome and Introductory Remarks
His Excellency Evan J. Paki, Ambassador of Papua New Guinea to the United States of America

11:00    Art Forms across the Papuan Gulf
Robert L. Welsch, Visiting Professor of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, and Adjunct Curator of Anthropology, The Field Museum

11:30    Papuan Gulf Art and the National Museum
Sebastine Haraha, Senior Technical Officer, Department of Anthropology, National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea

12:00    Break for lunch

1:30    In Situ: Photographs of Art in the Papuan Gulf
Virginia-Lee Webb, Research Curator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

2:00    Creating Images: Frank Hurley and the Australian Museum’s Collections
from the Gulf of Papua
Jim Specht, Senior Fellow, Australian Museum

FILM

2:30    The Mythic Camera of Frank Hurley (2004)
Directed by Simon Nasht (53 min.)

LECTURES

3:30    A Century After Outsiders Came to Visit: Life in the Purari Delta Today
Kaia Rove, Local Level Government Councillor of Ward 14, Baimuru District, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea

4:00    Canoes, Carvings, and the Ancestors: Fluid Forms of the Purari Delta of
Papua New Guinea
Joshua A. Bell, Lecturer in Arts of the Pacific, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, University of East Anglia

Free with Museum admission; tickets and reservations are not required. For more information, please consult the Museum's online Calendar at www.metmuseum.org,
call (212) 396-5460, or contact [email protected].

This symposium is made possible by The Billy Rose Foundation, Inc.

The exhibition Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until December 2, 2007.

The exhibition is made possible by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

It was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Programs occur in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY.

Conference on Pacific Island Material Culture Documentation

This conference seeks to bring attention to Pacific collection materials that are not well known but that have special value to Pacific communities and to the general public. It also seeks to focus attention on issues and developments regarding access to these materials, as well as to digitizing projects underway. An international group of Pacific librarians will share information about their collections and discuss common concerns.

The keynote speaker for the conference is award-winning poet, author, and former librarian Robert Sullivan, a UHM assistant professor of English. Other featured speakers include David Kukutai Jones, Maori specialist at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand; and Ewan Maidment, Executive Officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Canberra, Australia. The conference convener is Dr Karen Peacock, UHM Pacific curator and head of Special Collections.

Conference registration information is on the Web. Registration is $20 general and $5 students. The registration deadline is 1 March 2007.

The conference is sponsored by the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies through a US DOE Title VI National Resource Center Grant. It is also supported by the UHM library system.

For more information, contact CPIS outreach coordinator, Tisha Hickson, at [email protected]. For program information, contact Karen Peacock, at [email protected].