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NYTimes Review: African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, "Lesson and Feast"

Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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via NYTimes Art Review | 'African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva':

Putting ‘Primitive’ to Rest

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 4, 2009

In the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum you’ll find a tiny African copper relief that probably predates, and would surely have awed, the great Lorenzo Ghiberti. You’ll encounter a bust of a Nigerian beauty to rival Nefertiti; an Oceanic Apollo with the physique of an Olympian; and a Micronesian statuette that is, with its stacks of faceted planes, Brancusi before Brancusi.

These objects, along with 32 others, make up the exhibition called “African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting.” The show, an unabashed masterpiece display, is not only a gold mine of historical data and a connoisseur’s delight, but also a reminder of how perceptions evolve — a mere few decades ago everything here was referred to as “primitive art.”

This was a capacious category. It covered African, Oceanic and North American Indian material, as well as Pre-Columbian art from Central and South America and all things “tribal” from everywhere else. Only fairly recently have the political dimensions of “primitive” begun to be fully sorted out and reckoned with.

Meanwhile, long-established museum collections built on that catch-all concept are still with us, changed now in their thinking if not necessarily in their form.

The Barbier-Mueller Museum represents one such collection; the Rockefeller Wing, with origins in Nelson A. Rockefeller’s 1957 Museum of Primitive Art, another. At the Met the two converge, complementing and extending each other. In one sense the result is an old-fashioned sampler display of one-tribe-one-style sculptural types: a classic reliquary figure from Gabon; a textbook New Ireland mask; and so on.

At the same time, by bringing certain comparable pieces from two different collections together, the show is an invitation to alter our habits of looking. We are encouraged to retain a sense of the context and history of objects, but to pay more than usual attention to interpretive inventiveness and formal finesse: in short, to get a sense of the many things that “great” in art based on non-Western models can mean.

In the Barbier-Mueller exhibition that spectrum is wide and deep. The collection was started in the early 20th century by Josef Mueller (1887-1977), the son of a Swiss industrialist. A young man with a hankering for the vie de bohème, he moved to Paris in 1907. Not being an artist himself, he became a collector, buying Picassos hot from the studio, and in due course buying what Picasso was buying: African and Oceanic art.

[read on...]

African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting

Forehead Ornament (Kapkap)
Western Solomon Islands, 19th century
Tridacna shell, turtle shell, fiber; Diam: 4 3/4 in. (12 cm)
Provenance: H. Gibson, England, before 1893; Royal United Services Institute Museum, London, 1893; James Hooper, England, before 1979; [Christie's, London 1980], Barbier-Mueller collection, sin

ce 1980

African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting
June 2, 2009–September 27, 2009
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor

	View images from this exhibition.

The collections of African and Oceanic art in the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, begun in the 1920s by Josef Mueller and continued by Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, represent the culmination of more than eight decades of wide-ranging collecting of works from both regions. Presenting more than thirty highlights from the Barbier-Mueller’s holdings of African and Oceanic sculpture, most never before displayed in the United States, this exhibition explores a rich legacy of connoisseurship. The African works in the exhibition—sculpture and masks from western, eastern, and central Africa, from miniature to monumental in scale, made of wood, ivory, metal, and terracotta—illustrate both the creativity of the continent’s artists and the discerning eye of the collectors. The Oceanic works, an array of rare and spectacular objects that exemplify the breadth of achievement by artists from across the Pacific, include a striking group of figures, masks, and decorative art from Polynesia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, and other areas.
Accompanied by a catalogue. 

The exhibition is made possible by Vacheron Constantin.
It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva. 

The Tropics exhibition comes to Cape Town

The exhibition The Tropics: Views from the Middle Ground is now on view at the Iziko South African National Gallery through June 14.

The Tropics, which first opened last year in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro and then in a much larger incarnation in Berlin, unites 85 works of contemporary art by 39 artists along with 200 objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the tropical America from the collections of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

"The issue at the center of the exhibition," writes Klaus-Dieter Lehmann in his overview of the show's concept,

is a re-estheticization of the Tropics. The aim of this re-estheticization is "to bring the cultural weight of the tropical natural environments to bear in view of the overwhelming power of political and economic discourses." It is artistic expression which is becoming emancipated here vis-à-vis the daily poverty debates and superficial banalizations; it allows approximations that neither science nor religion can afford.

Alfons Hugs, the project's initiator, writes in his text to the catalog that

[S]ince it is an art exhibition, the selection of the older works was primarily based on aesthetic and not on scientific criteria ... Instead of one-dimensional debates on poverty (or hunger, or violence, or political crises) or crass generalizations we are offered a glimpse of the artistic complexity and aesthetic richness of the tropics in a way that promises to change the terms of the North-South dialogue. This will free the South from the trap of always being seen in a bad light, while the North’s insistence on explaining the world in economic terms can be put into proportion, thus paving the way for a genuinely cosmopolitan and multi-perspective view of the world in the Humboldtian sense.

The show is structured around seven "mythically charged" themes meant to integrate the traditional and contemporary artworks: After the Flood, The Short Life, The Color of Birds, The Forbidden Laughter, The Broken Arrow, Tropical Baroque, and The Urban Drama.

The Tropics is accompanied by a comprehensive published catalog (available in German and in English -- click here for the English edition in WorldCat) in addition to the extensive web site.

The Truth about the Lost Amazon Tribe "Hoax"

[Image source: AFP]

reblogged via Huff Post:

The Truth about the Lost Amazon Tribe "Hoax"

By David Grann, Author, staff writer at The New Yorker

Posted March 8, 2009 | 08:44 PM (EST)

Last year José Carlos Meirelles, who works for the Brazilian government agency set up to protect the country's indigenous populations, released photographs that captivated the public imagination. Taken from an airplane swooping over the Amazon jungle, the pictures showed a group of Indians--their faces streaked with war paint, their bows drawn with arrows--that were said to remain uncontacted by the outside world.

Meirelles said that he had released the photographs to protect the tribe's territory from the onslaught of prospectors and loggers and farmers. In pursuit of such bountiful land, settlers had denied there were any remaining uncontacted Indians, and had mounted a campaign to open these territories for commercial use.
A few days after the photographs were made public, reports in the media surfaced that seemed to confirm the settlers' contention: the images were labeled "fakes," and widely dismissed as part of a "hoax," a "fraud," and a "PR joke."

Yet this perception was deeply misleading, and has had severe repercussions for the Indians in the region. As I document in my new book "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon," even today parts of the Amazon--a wilderness area virtually the size of the continental United States--remain unknown. The Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty tribes that are secluded in the jungle. John Hemming, the distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians, has said that these forests are almost "the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind."

The dispute over the photographs stemmed from confusion over the meaning of "uncontacted," as these groups are commonly designated. Though Meirelles had never said the tribe was unknown, many in the press had initially portrayed the group as such. In fact, like many of these tribes, the group's existence had had long been known about--its presence detected either by frontiersmen or by satellite imagery. Indeed, it is likely that many of these tribes have had some form of fleeting "contact" with outsiders over the years.

But that did not make the photographs "fakes" or a "hoax." The reason these tribes are classified as "uncontacted" is because they have retreated into the jungle and consciously avoided any interaction with settlers--an interaction that has frequently led to the extinction of Amazonian tribes.

In 2005, I visited the Kalapalo Indians in the southern basin of the Amazon. The tribe lived in the Xingu, which is part of Brazil's first Indian reservation. (It was created in 1961.) While the tribe had been contacted by the Brazilian government several decades earlier, its fate gives some sense of the threat to these indigenous communities.

While I was there, I spoke with a member of the tribe named Vanite, whose job was to guard one of the posts on the reservation. He told me that the other day an Indian had come to him and said, "Listen, Vanite. You must come with me down the river. The white people are building something in Afasukugu." The word "Afasukugu" meant "the place of the big cats"; at this site, the Kalapalos believe, the first humans were created. Vanite picked up a stick and drew a map on the mud floor. "Here is Afasukugu," he said. "It is by a waterfall."

Vanite paused for a moment, then continued with his story. "So I said, 'I will go with you to Afasukugu, but you are crazy. Nobody would build anything at the place of the jaguars.' But when I get there the waterfall is destroyed. They blew it up with thirty kilos of dynamite. The place was so beautiful, and now it is gone. And I ask a man working there, 'What are you doing?' He says, 'We are building a hydroelectric dam.' "

The dam was being built in the middle of a major river that ran through the Kalapalos' territory. Vanite, who was becoming more agitated, said, "A man from the [Brazilian] government comes to the Xingu and tells us, 'Do not worry. This dam will not hurt you.' And he offers each us of money. One of the chiefs from another tribe took the money, and the tribes are now fighting with each other. For me, the money means nothing. The river has been here for thousands of years. We don't live forever, but the river does. The god Taugi created the river. It gives us our food, our medicines. You see, we don't have a well. We drink water right from the river. How will we live without it?"

After Vanite finished his account, the chief of the Kalapalos, who was standing beside him, concluded, "If they succeed, the river will disappear and, with it, all our people."

Related News On Huffington Post:

HOAX: The Lost Amazonian Tribe That Wasn't They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an 'undiscovered tribe' in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian...

Mystery of Ancient Pueblo Jars Is Solved

via nytimes.com:

By MICHAEL HAEDERLE
Published: February 3, 2009

ALBUQUERQUE — For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen.

Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects.

But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border. [read on]

[image source]

This just in ...: Tribal

Tribal : the magazine of tribal art celebrates its 50th issue.

Contents of the Autumn/Winter 2008 (vol. 13, no. 1) issue (via Tribal Art):

ART on view :

• The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End (LaGamma, Alisa)
  •     On view at the Met September 30, 2008–April 5, 2009

• Pacific Treasures: The Masco Collection Goes to Los Angeles (Harding, Julian)

• New Galleries for the Ancient Americas at LACMA (Fields, Virginia M. ; Lyall, Victoria)

• Art of the Arctic at the Musée du Quai Branly (Gramly, Richard Michael)

• Oceania: Ritual Signs, Authority Symbols (Herreman, Frank)

FEATURE :

• Fang Masks of Equatorial Africa (Perrois, Louis)

TRIBAL people :

• An Interview with Marc Franklin (Dimondstein, Joshua)

OBJECT History :

• The Easter Island Statue in Brussels (Cauwe, Nicolas)

SPOTLIGHT :

• Master Hands of the Lega (De Grunne, Bernard)

ART + Law :

• Binoche vs. Mexico (Hewitt, Simon)

PORTFOLIO :

• Images of Plains Indians by Karl Bodmer (Tom McLaughlin)

Click here to check in WATSONLINE on availability of the print version

Click here to access the online version through WATSONLINE (not yet available as of 12/19/08)

Africa, the Americas and Even Outer Space @ 80 Washington Square East

 

“Miss D’vine I” by Zanele Muholi.

The South African photographer and queer activist Zanele Muholi updates the classic ethnological tableau of an exotic, all but nude “native maiden” by having a model of ambiguous sex play the part, while a portrait painting by a popular artist from Ghana, Kwame Akoto, who goes by the professional name of Almighty God, declares through an inscription that cross-dressing is an unholy act.

Photo: Jean Vong

via NYTimes:

Last Chance

A Multicultural Swirl of Africa, the Americas and Even Outer Space

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: December 2, 2008

It is said that multiculturalism won the 2008 presidential election. So why does contemporary art in New York feel so unicultural these days? A decade ago exhibitions linking Africa and the Americas were not uncommon. They are now, though, which may be one reason that “S&M: Shrines and Masquerades in Cosmopolitan Times” at the 80 Washington Square East Galleries looks so fresh.

 

"In this show to pose is to perform, and performance is a ritual. The Senegalese artist Soly Cisse has the glowering glamour of a hip-hop deity in Kehinde Wiley’s painting of him. "

 

Photo: Jean Vong

 

 

 

Technically it’s an adjunct to two shows of African textiles, one at the Grey Art Gallery a few doors away on the New York Universitycampus at Washington Square, the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But one glance is enough to establish that “S&M” is not just part of a larger picture. It occupies a planet all its own.

You know you’ve landed when you see “The Mothership Tranceformer,” a rainbow-hued patchwork tent by Xenobia Bailey. Part shrine, part home, part workshop, with a sewing machine outside its door, it is a component of a project called “Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk” that Ms. Bailey has been working on for years. An Afro-futuristic vision, it owes as much to Sun Ra as to the quilters of the American South and tribal crafts.

But even before reaching Ms. Bailey’s house of many colors, you encounter other hybrid things. An abstract sculpture by Senga Nengudi made of pantyhose and wire looks like a many-breasted goddess sprouting from a wall. A rangy assemblage by Thomas McDonell and Richie Gergel, two young New York artists who worked together in Ghana, suggests an African power figure with a video screen for a face.

In drawings by Robert Pruitt, life-size figures wear what looks like homemade space gear. And in photographic self-portraits from the 1970s, the Cameroonian artist Samuel Fosso offers a personal version of internationalist couture that verges on intergalactic.

In this show to pose is to perform, and performance is a ritual. The Senegalese artist Soly Cisse has the glowering glamour of a hip-hop deity in Kehinde Wiley’s painting of him. Joni Mitchell, or rather her doleful face as seen on the cover of her “Blue” album, weeps big blown-glass tears in an altarlike sculpture by Chris Bogia.

The South African photographer and queer activist Zanele Muholi updates the classic ethnological tableau of an exotic, all but nude “native maiden” by having a model of ambiguous sex play the part, while a portrait painting by a popular artist from Ghana, Kwame Akoto, who goes by the professional name of Almighty God, declares through an inscription that cross-dressing is an unholy act.

Clothes take on personalities of their own in the sculptures of Nancy Barton and Onyedika Chuke, and performance turns surreal in a confessional text piece by Leyden Ynobe Lewis, with its tone of rapture and psychological possession, and in a video by Tracey Rose that has the artist manically racing through a sendup of some anthropological vision of Africa as the original Eden, the font of primitive human life.

Ms. Rose has a way of going for laughs that are never really laughs. But the show’s most disquieting piece is another video, Lyle Ashton Harris’s “Performing MJ,” taped in a Yale classroom. Wearing diapers, pumps and whiteface, Mr. Ashton Harris alternates between infantile helplessness and explosions of rage, finally flailing his way out of the room like a trapped animal.

The video is named for Michael Jackson, whose face appears, painted on Ghanaian funerary cloth, in a piece titled “White Ebony” elsewhere in the gallery. Mr. Ashton Harris’s take on his subject is as oblique as it is intense: you end up feeling as baffled and quietly freaked-out as some of the viewers at this performance probably did. No American artist in the past two decades has more insistently yanked at the tensions that hold ideas of blackness and whiteness in place.

Mr. Ashton Harris is the subject of a traveling retrospective, which goes to New Orleans next spring. Why it hasn’t come to New York, his home city, is anybody’s guess. At least we’re getting something of him here, not just in the video but also in the exhibition as a whole, which he organized with Ms. Barton and Mr. Bogia. The result, bearing all the marks of his tuned-in, far-out sensibility, is one of the best group shows of the season so far.

“S&M: Shrines and Masquerades in Cosmopolitan Times” is at the 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York University, through Saturday; (212) 998-5747.

Yanomami Suffer From Neglect

Photo: Scott Dalton for The New York Times. Some Yanomami consider the ubiquitous images of them in Puerto Ayacucho patronizing.

via NYTimes:

Rain Forest Tribe’s Charge of Neglect Is Shrouded by Religion and Politics 
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: October 6, 2008 

PUERTO AYACUCHO, Venezuela — Three years after President Hugo Chávez expelled American missionaries from the Venezuelan Amazon, accusing them of using proselytism of remote tribes as a cover for espionage, resentment is festering here over what some tribal leaders say was official negligence that led to the deaths of dozens of indigenous children and adults.

Some leaders of the Yanomami, one of South America’s largest forest-dwelling tribes, say that 50 people in their communities in the southern rain forest have died since the expulsion of the missionaries in 2005 because of recurring shortages of medicine and fuel, and unreliable transportation out of the jungle to medical facilities.

Mr. Chávez’s government disputes the claims and points to more spending than ever on social welfare programs for the Yanomami. The spending is part of a broader plan to assert greater military and social control over expanses of rain forest that are viewed as essential for Venezuela’s sovereignty.

The Yanomami leaders are wading into a politicized debate about how officials react to health care challenges faced by the Yanomami and other Amazonian tribes. In recent interviews here, government officials contended that the Yanomami could be exaggerating their claims to win more resources from the government and undercut its authority in the Amazon.

Meanwhile, the Yanomami claims come amid growing concern in Venezuela over indigenous health care after a scandal erupted in August over a tepid official response to a mystery disease that killed 38 Warao Indians in the country’s northeast.

“This government makes a big show of helping the Yanomami, but rhetoric is one thing and reality another,” said Ramón González, 49, a Yanomami leader from the village of Yajanamateli who traveled recently to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas State, to ask military officials and civilian doctors for improved health care.

“The truth is that Yanomami lives are still considered worthless,” said Mr. González, who was converted to Christianity by New Tribes Mission, a Florida group expelled in 2005. “The boats, the planes, the money, it’s all for the criollos, not for us,” he said, using a term for nonindigenous Venezuelans.

The Yanomami leaders offer a far different image of the tribe than those found in anthropology books, which often depict it in Rousseaulike settings with painted faces and clad in loincloths.

There are about 26,000 Yanomami in the Amazon rain forest, in Venezuela and Brazil, where they subsist as seminomadic hunters and cultivators of crops like manioc and bananas.

They remain susceptible to ailments for which they have weak defenses, including respiratory diseases and drug-resistant strains of malaria. In Puerto Ayacucho, they can be seen wandering through the traffic-clogged streets, clad in the modern uniform of T-shirts and baggy pants, toting cellphones.

Earlier this decade, the anthropology world was consumed by claims by the writer Patrick Tierney that American scholars may have started and exacerbated a measles epidemic in the late 1960s that killed hundreds of Yanomami.

And claims of medical neglect emerged before Mr. Chávez expelled the American missionaries, who numbered about 200. They administered care to the Yanomami with donated medicine from the United States and transported them to clinics on small propeller planes using dozens of airstrips carved out of the jungle.

New Tribes, the most prominent of the expelled groups, has denied Mr. Chávez’s charges of espionage but declined to comment for this article, citing the tense relations between Venezuela and the United States.

Mr. González and other Yanomami leaders provided the names of 50 people, including 22 children, who they said died from ailments like malaria and pneumonia after the military limited civilian and missionary flights to their villages in 2005. The military replaced the missionaries’ operations with its own fleet of small planes and helicopters, but critics say the missions were infrequent or unresponsive.

The Yanomami leaders said they made the list public after showing it to health and military officials and receiving a cold response. “They told us we should be grateful for the help we’re already being given,” said Eduardo Mejía, 24, a Yanomami leader from the village of El Cejal. [...read full article...] 

AAOA celebrates twenty-five years of special exhibitions

This year the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas marks the twenty-fifth year of special exhibitions in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. It has given AAOA an opportunity to present timely and focused exhibitions, whether drawn from the permanent collection, important private collections, or traveling exhibitions. It also allows visitors to view special exhibitions within the context of the permanent collection. Arguably the first permanent gallery space in the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted exclusively to exhibitions of a single department, the gallery has spawned a host of imitators within other curatorial departments.

During this time the department has continued to exhibit numerous large-scale exhibitions in special exhibitions galleries elsewhere in the Museum.

Below is a list of the exhibitions from 1983 through the one that opens today. Exhibitions with publications are linked to the WATSONLINE catalog entry. An extraordinarily high percentage of the exhibitions have been accompanied by publications, from eight-page brochures to extensive exhibition catalogs.

Color and Shape in American Indian Art (March 25 – September 4, 1983)

Desert Valley: Early Work from Ica, Peru (September 27, 1983 – February 5, 1984)

Symbol and Substance in American Indian Art (February 28 – May 27, 1984)

African Ivories (June 26 – December 30, 1984)

Micronesia (January 21 – May 5, 1985)

Taino: The Art of the Dominican Republic (June 3 – October 15, 1985)

Mimbres Painted Pottery: Ancient Art of the American Southwest (November 19, 1985 – February 2, 1986)

Recent Acquisitions (April 2 – July 17, 1986)

Bamana: Sculpture from West Africa (August 19, 1986 – March 1, 1987)

Houses for the Hereafter: Funerary Temples from Guerrero, Mexico (April 28, 1987 – September 4, 1988)

Forest and Village: Art from Liberia and Ivory Coast (October 18, 1988 – January 1, 1989)

Early Indonesian Textiles from Three Island Culture (February 14 – May 14, 1989)

Southeast Asian Tribal Art: The Fred and Rita Richman Collection (June 13 – September 10, 1989)

Gold of Africa: The Barbier-Mueller Collection (October 20, 1989 – March 11, 1990)

Art of Central Africa: Masterpieces from the Berlin Museum fur Völkerkunde (June 6 – November 4, 1990)

New Guinea Bone Carvings (November 30, 1990 – March 20, 1991)

Royal Art of Benin from the Perls Collection: Treasures from the African Kingdom (January 16 – September 13, 1992)

Loma Negra, A Peruvian Lord’s Tomb (October 12, 1992 – July 4, 1993)

Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Art (October 13, 1993 – March 27, 1994)

Divine Protection: Batak Art of North Sumatra (April 19 – December 31, 1994)

Ancient Peruvian Mantles, 300 B.C. – A.D. 200 (February 23 – August 13, 1995)

River of Gold: Precolumbian Treasure from Sitio Conte (September 19, 1995 – February 4, 1996)

Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875-1925 (March 1 – August 4, 1996)

Enduring Rhythms: African Musical Instruments and the Americas (October 3, 1996 – August 3, 1997)

Master Hand: Individuality and Creativity Among Yoruba Sculptures (September 11, 1997 – July 12, 1998)

Jade in Ancient Costa Rica (September 16, 1998 – March 9, 1999)

Guardians of the Long House: Art in Borneo  (April 13, 1999 – January 16, 2000)

Perfect Document: Walker Evans and African Art (February 1 – September 3, 2000)

Rain of the Moon: Silver in Ancient Peru (November 3, 2000 – April 22, 2001)

Recent Acquisitions (May 22 – October 28, 2001)

Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island (December 11, 2001 – September 8, 2002)

Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture (November 19, 2002 – July 6, 2003)

Echoing Images: Couples in African Sculpture (February 10 – September 5, 2004)

Heritage of Power: Ancient Sculpture from West Mexico: The Andrall E. Pearson Family Collection (October 19, 2004 – April 3, 2005)

Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands (May 9, 2005 – January 15, 2006)

The Fabric of Life: Ikat Textiles of Indonesia (February 28 – September 24, 2006)

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf (October 25, 2006 – December 2, 2007)

Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru (February 26 – September 1, 2008)

The Essential Art of African Textile: Design Without End (September 30, 2008 – March 22, 2009)

Exploring the Early Americas: an interactive online exhibition @ The Library of Congress

via Library of Congress:

Exploring the Early Americas features selections from the more than 3,000 rare maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress. It provides insight into indigenous cultures, the drama of the encounters between Native Americans and European explorers and settlers, and the pivotal changes caused by the meeting of the American and European worlds. The exhibition includes two extraordinary maps by Martin Waldseemüller created in 1507 and 1516, which depict a world enlarged by the presence of the Western Hemisphere.  

 Learn More

This exhibition can be viewed online; the website also offers interactive features.