Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2006
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By Robert L. Welch, Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College and an Adjunct Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum, Chicago.
When missionaries, explorers, prospectors and Western colonial officials arrived in the Papuan Gulf in the late 1970s, they immediately realized that the region's art was some of the most important in all of New Guinea. These elaborate art traditions were centered on large barkcloth masks, carved and painted boards, wickerwork figurines intended for secret rituals. With Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf, presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, these remarkable works have been made the subject of a major American exhibition for the first time since Douglas Newton's Art Styles of the Papuan Gulf debuted at the Museum of Primitive Art in New York City in 1961. In the forty-five years separating the two exhibitions, the appetite of private collectors for this unique art has continued to grow, as evidenced by the significant acquisitions of the family of Harry A. Franklin which were donated to the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Major studies have also been undertaken in the field of research, conducted by Virginia-Lee Webb and myself. The exhibition and the catalogue that accompanies it are based on Newton's work as well as new perspectives offered by the study of more than forty collections and photographic archives around the world, expanding and improving the understanding of these extraordinary artistic traditions. |