A new exhibition showcasing the traditional arts of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia opens at the Bowers Museum on February 20. Featuring more than 150 tribal objects, Spirits and Headhunters vividly presents the complex and exquisite blend of artistic sensitivity and spiritual essence found in the art of the Pacific, strikingly suffused in each artifact the installation has to offer. Associated with the esoteric men's house of the Sepik River region, the works on display include shamanic items, beautifully crafted ornaments, weaponry, shell and feather currency, splendid feast bowls, and the most precious of human trophies––the human skull––taken in a spirit of retribution and reverence.

The third great anthropological exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly welcomes visitors to discover a "factory of images" that touches all the world's inhabited continents. Featuring 160 traditional works, the exhibition invites audiences to contemplate and decode humanity's great artistic and material creations, to delve deeper and reveal in an image what can't initially be seen.

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.

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.

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.

The new exhibition at the Mingei International Museum centers around the theme of beauty and meaning of objects used in the various contexts of family life, tribal and community objectives, and religious ceremony. Rite and Ritual presents a variety of works, including African drums, feathered Amazonian headdresses, and masks and ceremonial items from a number of world cultures.

In late July, LACMA’s new Latin American galleries will be opened to the public. The galleries will feature recent acquisitions, Spanish colonial, modern, and contemporary art, as well as a collection of ancient American art, which spans 3,000 years of North, Central, and South American history. The pre-Columbian material will be displayed in a special installation, designed by artist Jorge Pardo, that abandons the traditional culture-chronology layout used in most museum galleries in favor of a thematic approach intended to provide a greater cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic context for the ancient objects. Pardo’s installation design was funded in part by the David Bohnett Foundation, Ann Tenenbaum, and Thomas H. Lee, and other donors.

A Stolen World denounces the plundering of art resources that many countries have suffered. The market for stolen works of art is among the world's largest illegal trades. One notorious example presented in the exhibition is a group of textiles unearthed by tomb robbers on Peru's Paracas Peninsula. Fine multicolored textiles, with representations of human figures, animals, and flora, they were used as funerary garments for the deceased. The textiles are highly sought after, especially since they are often in an excellent state of preservation. On view through 2010.

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.