Listening to Our Ancestors explores how native peoples along the coast of Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska continue time-honored practices in an ever-changing modern world. The exhibition features more than 400 ceremonial and everyday objects, including dance blankets, fishing hooks, masks, and spoons, as well as commentary from representatives of 11 contemporary North Pacific Coast nations.

This exhibition presents 55 exquisitely beaded dresses and more than 200 accessories, including belts, leggings, moccasins, and purses, created by a multitude of Native American cultures throughout the Plateau, Great Plains, and Great Basin regions. Curated and developed by women of several different tribes, the exhibition explores identity and tradition juxtaposed with cultural change and our contemporary time. Highlights include a very rare Sioux side-fold dress, a Yakama two-hide dress, and a Shoshone two-hide pattern dress with a fully beaded yoke, all of which date to the nineteenth century. A book accompanies the exhibition.

The Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen is currently showing The World's Glory, which features a wealth of international artifacts collected in the course of expeditions, some of which date as far back as the 17th and 18th centuries. Magical masks from Greenland, African figures, and Burmese Buddhas are on display alongside a number of pieces that have not been exhibited in many years. Composed of objects from the Nationalmuseet's own collections, this exhibition features elements of a show created several years ago by the Nationalmuseet (upon the request of the Spanish Fundación La Caixa) which traveled to five Spanish cities in 2006–07. A parallel showing of The World's Glory, also featuring elements of this previous Spanish exhibition, will be on view at the Kongernes Jelling, June 7 – October 19.

Nationalmuseet

Kongernes Jelling

On August 10, Guy Earl-Smith and Galerie Finn will present an auction of international antiquities, including a large number of ethnographic artifacts from Australia, Africa, and Oceania. Works from India, China, Southeast Asia, and Classical Europe will also be featured.

For more information, visit www.guyearlsmith.com.au

Presented by the Hood Museum of Art, Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body explores the history of the icons and stereotypes of black womanhood through a variety of material that depicts perspectives from the traditional African, Western colonial, and contemporary global spheres. The objects on display cover a broad range of media, numbering more than 100 sculptures, prints, postcards, paintings, textiles, and video installations. Subjects of the exhibition encompass beauty ideals, fertility and sexuality, maternity and motherhood, and women’s identities and social roles. A 370-page illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition. Black Womanhood will move to the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in September and to the San Diego Museum of Art in January 2009.

This exhibition explores 500 years of history and art related to Mami Wata (Mother Water), the water spirit celebrated and revered in Africa and the African Atlantic world. Sculptures, paintings, masks, and altars from western and central Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States illustrate the differences and similarities of this ever-changing spirit through different eras, cultures, and geographical areas.

The Baltimore Museum’s third and final installation in the Meditations on African Art series will feature more than 70 diverse African objects, several of which are on display for the first time. Powerful textiles, whimsical adinkra dye stamps, finely carved ivories, painted shields, and figurative works emphasize the function and meaning of pattern in cultural style, body adornment, and visual design. To compliment this exhibition, Nigerian-born and London-based artist Mary Evans will create site-specific works, such as video montages, murals, and framed works.

For enquiries contact:

Bill Evans
caspian@bigpond.net.au
+61 417 674 559

www.mossgreen.com.au

Resisting Color features 18 textiles from South America, Africa, the South Pacific, and Asia. The textiles on display range from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, whereof half are recent additions to the DMA’s collection and are being exhibited for the first time. The exhibition's title points to the techniques used in the creation of the textiles, which naturally varies from region to region. Visitors will encounter a Hausa man’s robe from Cameroon and a Mapuche poncho from Chile, as well as a Ranquel chief’s poncho from Argentina.

Through a selection of 100 objects of dazzling beauty and palpable force, this exhibition testifies to the creative virtuosity and technical artistic skill of the peoples of Africa and Oceania since the ninth century B.C. The objects on display represent the dedicated work of three generations of enlightened collectors.

Musée Jacquemart André
158 boul. Haussmann
75008 Paris
Tel : +33 1 45 62 11 59