A highlight in the North American ethnographic arts calendar, the 2010 San Francisco Tribal & Textile Arts Show will offer visitors a vast ensemble of sculptures, textiles, and ornaments from all quarters of Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. Featuring 108 participating international dealers, this year's edition of the prestigious salon may be the finest to date.

Maastricht's eagerly awaited annual antique and fine art fair, widely acknowledged as the supreme event of its kind, promises a wide and interesting range of tribal art this year. TEFAF regulars Anthony Meyer and Bernard De Grunne will be joined by Entwistle Gallery this time around, and in the salon's Showcase section, Gallery Dierking of Cologne will also be showing African art. In addition, Polak Works of Art, one of the last generalists, will present a selection of ethnographic art as per usual.

Maastricht Exhibition & Congress Centre
Forum 100
6229 GV Maastricht
The Netherlands
Tél: +31 43 383 83 83

This exhibition documents Captain James Cook’s three journeys to the Pacific Islands in the late eighteenth century and features hundreds of specimens of human material culture and natural history items that he and his crew collected. Drawn from museum and private collections across Europe and the United States, the objects in this installation together form one of the most significant exhibitions of Cook voyage material ever to be mounted.

Bonhams & Butterfields will present a substantial sale of tribal artifacts from Oceania, Africa, and the pre-Columbian Americas on February 12 in San Francisco. Featuring some 280 lots, the auction will offer a wide range of ornamental, ritual, and utilitarian objects from Africa and all quarters of the Pacific, as well as an array of ancient ceramics and stonework from Mexico to Peru.

Currently on view at the Musée Barbier-Mueller, this exhibition presents an array of objects and ornaments that emphasize the beauty of the gemological and natural materials from which they were created. Treasures from all world regions and eras, fashioned of gold and silver, encrusted with stones or pearls, forged of bronze or iron, crafted from ivory, wood, shells, feathers, or jade, these jewels of the Barber-Mueller collection are presented in dialogue with amazing crystalline and mineral specimens of astonishing beauty.

Presenting African and Oceanic artifacts side by side with twentieth-century photographs, this exhibition examines the interrelation between the histories of these objects, the photographic eye, and the practice of collecting. Originally created as sacred or utilitarian items––and oftentimes both––the identities of many extra-European objects were lost, distorted, or reimagined over time by the Westerners who collected and depicted them. Object, Image, Collector explores this process and the dramatic recasting of artifacts as art, presenting tribal works from twenty-one private Boston collections and photographs from Charles Sheeler, Walker Evans, and others.

This summer, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art opened Artful Animals, a family-oriented exhibition designed to appeal to African art enthusiasts of all ages. Organized collaboratively with a number of other Smithsonian museums, the installation includes zoological contributions from the National Zoo, animal stamps from the National Postal Museum, and interactive exhibits by the National Museum of Natural History, as well as performance, dance, and storytelling by the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theater. The exhibition also features 125 traditional and contemporary African works portraying a wide array of animals, such as buffalo, sharks, elephants, pangolins, and more.

Through May 16, 2010, the Museum der Kulturen will be showing an exhibition devoted to the art of weaving in West Africa. The textiles and clothing displayed, which come from Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire, were collected by the museum in the 1970s in the course of an expedition sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Renée Boser-Sarivaxénavis, former curator of the African department, and Bernhard Gardi, the museum’s current curator, assembled nearly a thousand textiles and textile works during their sixteen months of travels.

A new exhibition at the Musée Dapper, curated jointly by Christine Falgayrettes-Leveau and Anne van Cutsem-Vanderstraete, will provide insight into the male realm through the presentation of traditional tribal ornaments and sculptures. Featuring works from some of the finest public and private collections, the exhibition will be organized by geographic location, covering the diversity of the major culture areas of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Aside from the artistic aspects of the works, the exhibition will emphasize the extreme diversity of materials, largely drawn from natural resources, used for the creation of ornaments, as well as the objects’ complex and socially important symbolic content.

Music is a universal human phenomenon but musical instruments and musical expression take an almost infinite variety of forms throughout the world. This is especially true in Oceania, whose more than 1,800 different peoples create an astonishing diversity of musical instruments, from familiar types, such as drums, flutes, and the Hawaiian ukulele, to more unusual forms, such as slit gongs carved in the form of ancestral catfish; bullroarers, whose eerie whirring sounds are said to be the voices of supernatural beings; and delicate stringed instruments with sounding chambers fashioned from palm leaves.