The art of Melanesia is being honored at the Museum für Völkerkunde with a new exhibition entitled Masken der Südsee (Masks of the South Seas). Featuring works from New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, and the Bismarck Archipelago, the masks in this installation offer an overview of the traditions and customs of this part of the Pacific. The finest examples from the Völkerkunde Museum's extensive collection have been selected and beautifully displayed, together forming a remarkable group of objects both deeply religious and vividly decorative.

Currently on view at the Museum für Völkerkunde, Indians of North America, a Search for Traces is an exploration of Native American cultures that focuses on their diversity and richness. Built on a series of oppositions inherent to the Indian world––the Indian as warrior vs. white men's captive, for example––the exhibition features a wide range of iconic material culture, much of which has not been on public view for decades. Some of the installation's most notable features are its reconstructed Indian dwellings, which include a Southwest pueblo, a Plains teepee, and a Northwest Coast spirit house.

Featuring pieces from the world-renowned collection of ancient Mayan pottery excavated by the Penn Museum almost a century ago, Painted Metaphors offers clues to a new understanding of Mayan life and political development through the analysis of the objects' pictorial narratives. The exhibition presents over 200 ceremonial and utilitarian objects unearthed in the highland village of Chamá, whose inhabitants used their skill in ceramic making to illustrate the changes in their culture brought about by the introduction of ideas and populations from the lowlands. After ending its inaugural run at the Penn Museum, Painted Metaphors will begin a multi-city national tour.

Wearing Wealth and Styling Identity: Tapis from Lampung, South Sumatra, Indonesia examines the unique textile tradition of tapis, ornate tubular dresses dyed and decorated using ancient ancestral methods. Conceived as an historical chronology of tapis from the period of its earliest recorded mention to contemporary times, the installation examines not only the aesthetic merits of these remarkable textiles, but also their important role as carriers of social information and signifiers of identity. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Known as the cradle of humanity and protected as a UNESCO world patrimony site, the remote and inaccessible Omo Valley in southwest Ethiopia is home to about ten livestock-raising peoples who survive in its austere environment. The MRAC holds one of the most important collections of ethnographic objects from this area, a selection of which is being presented to the public for the first time with Omo: People and Design. The exhibition also addresses the social and geopolitical issues currently facing these peoples, and includes about sixty portraits and body painting photographs by Hans Silvester.

This exhibition showcases the Musée Barbier-Mueller's collection of African terra cottas in all its many facets, featuring works from long-vanished cultures as well as from traditions which still persist today. With a symbolic force equalling their aesthetic beauty, the objects on view offer at once an historical and geographical journey across the African continent.

Showcasing an array of beautifully refined ceramics from the southwestern United States, A River Apart: The Pottery of Cochiti and Santo Domingo Pueblos is on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through June 6, 2010. The two pueblos, which are located in the the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, shared a ceramic tradition for centuries until contact with outsiders set them on divergent artistic paths. Through a display of nearly 250 pieces from the museum’s collection, visitors are provided with a range of perspectives––art historical, anthropological, curatorial, and aesthetic––that serve to reveal the multiple meanings the pottery often holds.

Having closed its doors in January of 2008 after 100 years at its Ubierring location, this important ethnographic museum is planned to reopen in a new building in the center of Cologne in the summer of 2009. The museum's rich collections of tribal art, which include works from Africa, Oceania, North America, and Southeast Asia, will be treated to expanded display space in the new structure––a boon for tribal art enthusiasts and scholars, as these important collections have seldom been exhibited, and have been made visible to the public only through a small number of publications.

Through some 130 works, this exhibition sets out to evoke the many and various representations of the feminine form that are interpreted by the multifarious arts of Africa. The figures on display represent not only maternal roles and forms but also those of religion and politics, which are frequently linked. Many of the works reveal a variety of ritual practices that took place at initiations or at religious ceremonies marking the milestones of women's lives. Prints by contemporary Cameroonian photographer Angèle Etoundi, whose work explores bodies and faces, are also featured in the exhibition.

Conceived in partnership with Le Toit du Monde, this exhibition explores the traditions of Nepal, as attractive as they are ignored. Eminently religious, the material culture of Nepal is characterized by its soft and elegant forms, carried out in varied style and testifying to the aesthetic and spiritual influences of Buddhism, Hinduism, and animism.

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