Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2011

By Virginia-Lee Webb, art historian and guest curator for the Menil Collection, Houston.

Introduction
The sculpture and decorated barkcloth (maro) made by artists whose names were not recorded in Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay on the island of New Guinea, have been greatly admired since their appearance in the West. Humboldt Bay was first seen by French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville in 1827 and Lake Sentani in 1892 by American entomologist William Doherty and Dutch missionary G. L. Bink in 1901. Throughout the early twentieth century there were mostly Dutch visitors to the region with scientific, colonial, religious, and anthropological interests. Thus the art and culture of these regions were introduced to the West via important scientific publications and sizable collections that found their way to museums in the Netherlands. However, by the third decade of the twentieth century, the collections and publications of two individuals, Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz (1892–1955) and French art dealer Jacques Viot (1898–1973), who visited the region separately in the 1920s, brought great acclaim to the art and culture through their expeditions, collections, publications, and photographs. Ancestors of the Lake, currently on view at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, is about their accomplishments.
The Menil Collection itself served as the inspiration for the exhibition. Its Pacific Island collection numbers over two hundred works, including six from Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay collected by Viot. Ancestors of the Lake is the first exhibition at the Menil Collection solely devoted to the arts of the Pacific Islands organized and presented by the museum. In addition, a new installa- tion of the Pacific Islands collection, by Kristina Van Dyke and Brooke Stroud, has opened at the museum.