Devoted to the various Naga societies of eastern India, this exhibition presents objects that have never before been seen by the public, drawn from collections that were assembled between 1870 and the beginning of the 1990s in the Ethnologisches Museum of Berlin, the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Munich, and the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. Gathered primarily by anthropologists Adolf Bastian, Lucian Scherman, and Hans-Eberhard Kauffman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the items on display shed light on a complex culture that, throughout history, has inspired both fear and admiration. Presented parallel to this exhibition is Naga: Jewels and Ashes, on view at the Zürich University Völkerkunde Museum until March 1, 2009.

Presented as a parallel exhibition to Naga. A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered, on view at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, this show features objects from the Naga territory of northeastern India. Unlike at the Basel Museum, which features a strictly historical view of the Naga, the objects presented in Jewels and Ashes are approached as elements of a precious archive that allows an understanding of contemporary aspects of the Naga culture, and places emphasis on the differences between past and present.

Heritage Auction Galleries will present its first Native American art sale of 2009 on January 22 in Dallas. The auction's 274 lots will comprise a variety of objects originating from a range of Native American cultures from New Mexico to Greenland, including painted and blackware ceramics, Navajo weavings, clothing, beadwork, weaponry, and more. Highlights of the sale will include several fine Plains garments from the nineteenth century.

View the online catalogue

The first major exhibition of Pacific art in Australia for over twenty years, God, Ghosts, and Men focuses on objects in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia that hold great spiritual and dramatic power. Visitors will find a wealth of items illustrating the beauty of ritual and festival life, including a rare Maori chieftan's huaki fiber cape, Awyu shields from western New Guinea, masks from New Britain, and a Cook Islands no'oanga stool, formerly the property of chiefs (ariki), who used them to indicate their social rank.

National Gallery of Australia
Parkes Place, Parkes
Canberra ACT 2600
Tel: +61 2 6240 6411

The Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde is honoring a significant historical collection with its current exhibition, The Penard Collection in the Spotlight. Brothers Frederik and Arthur Penard assembled this important group of tribal objects from Surinam at the beginning of the twentieth century and donated it to the Rijksmuseum in 1912. Visitors will have the opportunity to view a wide variety of objects, including musical instruments, utilitarian items, dance ornaments, pottery, and weapons, as well as the Penards' unique body of notes and drawings which accompany the collection.

Traje de la Vida presents a group of textiles from the Guatemalan highlands that tell stories of culture and personal identity as well as social and political transformation. Drawn from the Hearst Museum's extensive collection of Guatemalan textiles and collected over a hundred-year period, the objects on display include hand-woven ceremonial and dance costumes, traditional head cloths, and a quetzal (the national bird of Guatemala), to name only a few.

The Fowler Museum's latest installment in its ongoing "Fowler in Focus" series showcases the 4,000-year-old ceramics traditions of Colombia. The exhibition features approximately forty objects of ritualistic and religious importance, including vessels, plaques, and human and animal figurines, many of which are believed to depict shamans in various states of trance and transformation. The items on display are a part of the Muñoz Kramer Collection, which was recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Between the Beads focuses on the the many meanings conveyed by beadwork in African culture. Exploring a diverse and significant group of around 100 objects, the installation reveals that African beadwork tells stories about personal relationships, family ties, wealth, religious beliefs, and social and political standing. Sourced from the museum's own African collection as well as private collections, the works on display include personal adornments, regalia, masks, and sculpture. The exhibition also examines the history and cultural contexts of bead use, as well as the processes of bead production.

The Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig is inaugurating its new Americas Wing with a permanent exhibition entitled Die Amerikas. Lebenswelten vom Eismeer bis nach Feuerland. The new galleries occupy over 6,000 square feet of space and cover a wide variety of areas and indigenous cultures. Objects from the museum's collections of Nazca, Chimu, and Moche ceramics complement sculptures from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica and Tarahumara works, which in turn relate to pieces from North American Indian and Amazonian cultures. This permanent exhibition offers a complete and panoramic overview of the traditional cultures and societies that developed and evolved on the vast continents of the Americas.

Celebrating the complexity and variety of African art, this exhibition presents more than fifty works of art that span over four centuries of African history and represent cultures from all regions of the continent. Ivory and clay vessels, silver and leather jewelry, ornamented textiles, and a variety of sculptural objects, mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will be among the exhibited works. The oldest piece on display is a seventeenth-century elephant tusk trumpet from the Sherbro culture of Sierra Leone. The most modern is a photograph by Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi, taken in 2005. To augment the viewing experience, the show also offers photographs and video of a number of locations and peoples directly related to the art on view.