Viva Mexico! a récemment ouvert ses portes au Mingei International Museum pour célébrer le bicentenaire de l'indépendance mexicaine et le centenaire de la révolution à travers les traditions folk qui illustrent si vivement l'esprit de la nation. Crée en collaboration avec le centro Cultural de Tijuana et le consulat mexicain de San Diego, l'exposition est un recueil de la créativité, l'imagination et la sensibilité artistique des Mexicains. Elle présente aux visiteurs les événements-clés et les personnalités qui ont construit l'histoire et la culture du pays.

The Seattle Art Museum places a focus on stripes with Order and Border, a long-term exhibition which examines how stripes decorate and lend structure to objects bodies, and spaces. Textiles from Asia, Africa, and Indonesia are on prominent display, including a meditation cloth from Laos and a kingmaker's cloth from Nigeria. Also on view will be objects representing the use of stripes in three dimensions, including everyday vessels from ancient Nubia and Syria that contrast with brash splashes of color on a group of historic jars from China. The exhibition will also feature numerous photographs by a variety of artists, notably several by Lewis Hine taken in the early twentieth century.

The Horniman Museum's latest exhibition is devoted to the belief systems and culture of the Tuareg peoples. These nomads call themselves Kel Tagelmust (People of the Veil) and are dispersed over territory in Algeria, Liberia, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. The exhibition deals mainly with the two fundamental principles in the Tuareg system of values: firstly "asshak" (honor, dignity) and secondly "tekarakit" (integrity, reserve). These are expressed not only by behavior but also through clothing and ornaments. The objects on view come from two collecting expeditions, one undertaken by anthropologist Jeremy Keenan in the Algerian Hoggar in the late 1960s, and the other in 2005 by Ursel Widemann (who also curated the exhibition) in the Agadez area of Niger.

Zurich's Nordamerika Native Museum is showing an exhibition entitled Mantu'c: Little Spirits, die Sprache der Glasperlen (the Language of Glass Beads), which traces the history of the arrival of European-made beads in North America and their use by indigenous populations on that continent. For nearly four centuries, ever-increasing quantities of beads made their way from factories in Bohemia or Murano to satisfy North American Indian demand for them. Indigenous peoples, and later the Inuit, were fascinated by these multicolored, shiny ornaments and incorporated them into divine artistic creations with magical properties. Among the highlights of the show are a Scottish-styled Iroquois hat, a glove decorated with beads representing the Iroquois Confederacy, and pieces acquired from the Crow and brought to Europe by Sister Dorothy at the end of the nineteenth century.

This spring, the Museu Barbier-Mueller d'Art Precolombí surprised the public with an exhibition devoted to the arts of North America. Rastros del Norte. Norteamérica Antigua (Northern Trails: Ancient North America) presents nearly eighty exceptional pieces from the museum's collection, many hitherto unseen in Spain, in a way that not only emphasizes their aesthetic qualities but also serves as an invitation for discovery. In the installation, the visitor traverses three countries––Canada, the USA, and Mexico––and encounters some twenty extremely diverse cultures that flourished between the first millennium B.C. and the twentieth century of our era. Despite the vast differences that separate these cultures and their arts, the exhibition succeeds in emphasizing the traits they have in common, such as their relationship to nature, to the community, and to the afterlife, suggesting that there is such a thing as a traditional North American cultural identity.

At the Musée des Cultures Taurines de Nîmes (the Nîmes Bullfighting Museum), a town well known for its corridas and bullfights, gallery owner Olivier Larroque has curated an exhibition on the theme and importance of bovine creatures in traditional African art. The show presents nearly 100 works, some well known and others hitherto unseen, drawn from some thirty private European collections. The artistic production of some fifty cultures is represented and the exhibition offers explanations of the symbolic meanings of bovine depictions, which are widely seen on masks, statues, funerary posts, and objects of daily use. A 150-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Musée des Cultures Taurines
6 Rue Alexandre Ducros
30900 Nîmes
Tel: +33 04 66 36 83 77‎

Nearly 100 archaeological pieces from the ancient cultures of Albania, Macedonia, Romania, and Japan will be brought together this summer for an exhibition entitled Unearthed, presented at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. Works from the Japanese Jomon culture, which existed from 14,000 B.C. to the first century A.D., will be juxtaposed with those from the Balkan Neolithic cultures, which developed between 6,500 B.C. and 2,500 B.C., inviting reflection upon the differences and possible commonalities in the meanings, uses, and identities given them by their makers. The two cultures created figurines made of clay, which were later broken, and the exhibition attempts to understand if these cultural processes can be related to one another. Unearthed is a sequel to a show produced by the British Museum last winter on the Jomon culture and seeks to further our understanding of these fascinating figures, which evoke humanity's first attempts at artistic expression.

The Lowe Art Museum in Florida is currently presenting The Jaguar's Spots: Ancient Mesoamerican Art from the Low Art Museum, University of Miami, a showcase of 175 objects from the museum's permanent collection, many of which have never been on display before. The exhibition features ancient works from Mexico through Panama and Costa Rica and explores the perceived relationship between indigenous Mesoamerican populations and the jaguar, presenting objects from the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations spanning more than 2,000 years. The jaguar's presence is apparent in many of these intricately designed objects, reflecting the myriad myths and stories of the region in which deities assumed jaguar characteristics. Among the show's highlights is a fine and rare codex-style Maya vase with text and mythical imagery that was acquired especially for this exhibit. A catalogue accompanies the installation.

This summer, the Musée du Quai Branly presents an important exhibition on the artistic traditions of Central Africa, namely those of Gabon, the People's Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Leading visitors on an initiatory voyage through the forests of the north to the savannas of the south, the show reveals the links that exist between the works produced by various Bantu-speaking cultures in the areas bordering the majestic Congo River. Out of the great variety of masks and sculptures created by the Fang, Hemba, Kwele, and Kota, Fleuve Congo distills a selection of major Central African masterpieces, clarified in their design, structure, and the artistic bonds which unite them.

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of independence in seventeen African countries, Brussels' Palace of Fine Arts and the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren have organized a multidisciplinary festival entitled L'Afrique visionnaire, one of the major highlights of which is GEO-graphics, an exhibition invoking a dialogue between traditional and contemporary African art. Alongside an impressive group of some 220 tribal works, the show features a selection of pieces illustrating the current face of African art, including photographs of African urban landscapes composed by architect David Adjaye.

Palais des Beaux-Arts
23 Rue Ravenstein
1000 Brussels
Tel: +32 02 507 82 00