Art & Oceania: Case Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
2009
In 2003-4, the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, mounted an exhibition, Gauguin Tahiti, examining the French artist's career in Tahiti and the Marquesas between 1891 and his death in 1903. The organizers, George Shackelford and Claire Freches-Thory, assembled paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics by Paul Gauguin around his celebrated monumental painting, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? of 1897-8 (from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).1 A striking feature of the exhibition was the inclusion of a number of Tahitian, Marquesan, and other Polynesian objects. These were meant to lend context to Gauguin's works, and to exemplify the indigenous artefacts to which he was in part responding. Yet these Polynesian objects turned out to have the disturbing capacity to command attention in their own right, even when pressed into the service of a purely Western art history concerned with Gauguin's artistic progress f...
Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums Volume 2
2018
Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices. This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders' perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively. Volume II illustrates the sheer variety of Pacific artefacts and histories in museums, and similarly the heterogeneity of the issues and opportunities that they raise. Over thirty essays explore materialities, collection histories, legacies of empire, and contemporary projects.
Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums Volume 1
2018
Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices. This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders' perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively. Volume I focuses on the historical formation of ethnographic museums within Europe, the making of those institutions' Pacific collections, and the activation and re-activation of those collections, over time and in the present. Sidestone PACIFIC PRESENCES 4A
pacific presences Oceanic Art and European Museums pacific presences -volume 1 pacific presences
Pacific Presences, 2018
Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices. This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders' perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively. Volume I focuses on the historical formation of ethnographic museums within Europe, the making of those institutions' Pacific collections, and the activation and re-activation of those collections, over time and in the present. Sidestone PACIFIC PRESENCES 4A
FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF THE ARTS OF OCEANIA Book Review by Rod Ewins
Professor Sidney Mead describes the papers [in this group of papers from the 49th ANZAAS Conference] as covering 'a wider range than at most previous conferences on the Pacific' — specifically, wood¬carving (Bernard Kernot), music and dance (Peter Crowe, Allan Thomas and Jennifer Shennan) and oral narratives (Judith Huntsman). The emphasis on the performing as distinct from the plastic arts is probably fairly representative of the bias of scholarship in the art of Oceania at present, and this in itself is interesting. It is reflected in the priority given music and dance by the UNESCO Oceanic Cultures Project set up in the late 60s, which Crowe in his paper supposes 'were thought more vulnerable than others, such as handicrafts'. It may just as possibly be that even those who should know better will persist in regarding the plastic arts of Island peoples as handicraft — an inherently patronizing and belittling term.
ARTventures: An Australian curator in the field with Pacific artists
I will always take on an ARTventure. Just give me the challenge and a goal to reach and I’ll be off to any destination in Melanesia, or remote Aboriginal communities in Australia, or even travel to tribal areas of Taiwan. Each curatorial mission has the same essential objectives; to find pathways to connect Indigenous artists with their peers in the Pacific region and to raise the profile of Pacific art to global audiences. This essay was commissioned, translated into French and published in Mwà Véé, the Journal of the Agence de developpement de la culture Kanak (ADCK), (Agency of Kanak cultural development,) New Caledonia. The French version of this article appeared in Issue 78/79:2013, pp4-12. This is the original English version (unpublished).
Museum Anthropology Review, 2016
This work is a book review considering the title Repositioning Pacific Arts: Artists, Objects, Histories: Proceedings of the VII International Symposium of the Pacific Arts Association, Christchurch, New Zealand edited by Anne E. Allen and Deborah B. Waite.