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.

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.

Taken from the perspective of the Dutch experience in Southeast Asia and Melanesia, this exhibition explores the effects of European influence on the indigenous cultures of these regions, as well as other aspects of those cultures and their arts. The core of the exhibition was formed by the Holland Museum's founder, Willard C. Wichers, and among the highlights are two sixty-five-foot-long Balinese temple paintings on cloth. Also on view are more than sixty works of art and artifacts, including weapons, puppets, batik, and tribal masks.

Masked Festivals of Canton Bo, Southwest Ivory Coast features rare drawings, photographs, and masks from the Peabody Museum collection and explores the significance of masked spirit dancers, singers, and performers at festivals in eastern Liberia and western Ivory Coast. The exhibit examines how the men of Canton Bo assume different masked spirit roles, including male, female, young, old, singer, dancer, comic, judge, and adulterer.

This exhibition explores the meanings of the unique nineteenth-century "artist's book" that was recently discovered among the holdings of Houghton Library at Harvard University. This ledger contains seventy-seven colored drawings created by a number of Plains Indian warriors, illustrating their most outstanding feats in wars against both U.S. forces and tribal enemies. Wiyohpiyata puts these images into context by placing them in dialogue with other objects and images from the Peabody Museum's ethnographic collections, some of which are said to have been collected from Sitting Bull. The exhibition will be open indefinitely.

Researched and organized with the help of thirteen contemporary basket makers, this exhibition presents a selection of more than 250 baskets from the collection of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, the largest collection of Native American basketry in North America. Drawing from this vast resource, the Autry Museum offers visitors the opportunity to appreciate and compare the rich variety of materials, techniques, and motivations applied to the baskets of a wide array of cultures.

This winter, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened the exhibition Splendid Heritage: Perspectives on American Indian Art, on view through March 28, 2010. A total of 144 works on display from the private collection of John and Marva Warnock exemplify the craftsmanship and beauty of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American Indian objects. On view are beaded tobacco bags, weapons, dolls, cradles, war shirts, dresses, and more, many of which have never been on display prior to this exhibition.

The nearly 80 works in this exhibition showcase the diversity of purpose and style in functional African ceramics. Including works from cultures across the continent, the show is derived largely from a promised gift of nearly 100 African works from an anonymous New York-based collector. The gift is a welcome addition to the Museum's famed African art collection, and it includes notable objects from the Zulu, Lobi, and Songye cultures, among others.
African Ceramics is the first exhibit in the museum's newly reopened Ceramics II Gallery.