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Melanesia is a subregion of Oceania extending from New Guinea island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, and eastward to Tonga.
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material including historical artifacts.
Melanesians are the predominant and indigenous inhabitants of Melanesia, in a wide area from Maluku Islands and New Guinea to as far east as the islands of Vanuatu and Fiji. Most speak either one of the many languages of the Austronesian language family, especially ones in the Oceanic branch, or from one of the many unrelated families of Papuan languages. Other languages are the several creoles of the region, such as Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, Solomon Islands Pijin, Bislama, and Papuan Malay.
The Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) is a private fine arts and design college in Portland, Oregon. Established in 1909, the art school grants bachelor of fine arts degrees and graduate degrees including the master of fine arts (MFA) and master of arts (MA) degrees. It has an enrollment of about 500 students. PNCA actively participates in Portland's cultural life through a public program of exhibitions, lectures, and internationally recognized visual artists, designers, and creative thinkers.
Religion in Papua New Guinea is predominantly Christian, with traditional animism and ancestor worship often occurring less openly as another layer underneath or more openly side by side Christianity. The courts, government, and general society uphold a constitutional right to freedom of speech, thought, and belief. There is no state religion, although the government openly partners with several Christian groups to provide services, and churches participate in local government bodies.
The culture of Papua New Guinea is many-sided and complex. It is estimated that more than 7000 different cultural groups exist in Papua New Guinea, and most groups have their own language. Because of this diversity, in which they take pride, many different styles of cultural expression have emerged; each group has created its own expressive forms in art, dance, weaponry, costumes, singing, music, architecture and much more. To unify the nation, the language Tok Pisin, once called Neo-Melanesian has evolved as the lingua franca — the medium through which diverse language groups are able to communicate with one another in Parliament, in the news media, and elsewhere. People typically live in villages or dispersed hamlets which rely on the subsistence farming of yams and taro. The principal livestock in traditional Papua New Guinea is the oceanic pig.
Vadym Meller or Vadim Meller, was a Ukrainian-Russian Soviet painter, avant-garde Cubist, Constructivist and Expressionist artist, theatrical designer, book illustrator, and architect. In 1925 he was awarded a gold medal for the scenic design of the Berezil' theater in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris.
Lowery Stokes Sims is the retired Curator Emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design, where between 2007 and 2015, she served as the Charles Bronfman International Curator and then the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator. From 2000 to 2007, Sims was executive director then president of The Studio Museum in Harlem and served as Adjunct Curator for the Permanent Collection. Sims was on the education and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1972 to 1999. A specialist in modern and contemporary art she is known for her particular expertise in the work of African, Latino, Native and Asian American artists. She has published extensively and her research on the work of the Afro-Cuban Chinese Surrealist artist Wifredo Lam was published by the University of Texas Press in 2002. In 1997, she organized a survey of the work of Richard Pousette-Dart at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sims has lectured nationally and internationally and guest curated numerous exhibitions, most recently at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2004), The Cleveland Museum of Art and the New York Historical Society (2006). She is the editor and an essayist for the catalogue of the National Museum of the American Indian’s 2008 retrospective of Fritz Scholder. In 2003 and 2004, Sims served on the jury for the memorial for the World Trade Center and between 2004 and 2006, served as the chair of the Cultural Institutions Group, a coalition of museums, zoos, botanical gardens and performing organizations funded by the City of New York. Sims was a fellow at the Clark Art Institute in spring 2007. In 2005 and 2006, she was Visiting Professor at Queens College and Hunter College in New York City and in fall 2007, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She was in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Oceanic art or Oceanian art comprises the creative works made by the native people of the Pacific Islands and Australia, including areas as far apart as Hawaii and Easter Island. Specifically it comprises the works of the two groups of people who settled the area, though during two different periods. They would in time however, come to interact and together reach even more remote islands. The area is often broken down into four separate regions: Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Australia. Australia, along with interior Melanesia (Papua), are populated by descendants of the first waves of human migrations into the region by Australo-Melanesians. Micronesia, Island Melanesia, and Polynesia, on the other hand, are descendants of later Austronesian voyagers who intermixed with native Australo-Melanesians; mostly via the Neolithic Lapita culture. All of the regions in later times would be greatly affected by western influence and colonization. In more recent times, the people of Oceania have found a greater appreciation of their region's artistic heritage.
Papua New Guinean art has a long rich diverse tradition. In particular, it is world-famous for carved wooden sculpture: masks, canoes and story-boards. Papua New Guinea also has a wide variety of clay, stone, bone, animal and natural die art. Many of the best collections of these are held in overseas museums.
The Robert Goldwater Library in the department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a noncirculating research library dedicated to the documentation of visual arts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Native and Precolumbian America. The library is open to adult researchers, including college and graduate students.
In 1994, Jim Mason, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, arranged for two groups of men from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea to carve the New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford University. The men were from several communities or villages of the Iatmul people and the Kwoma people.
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Phillip Harold Lewis was an American anthropologist, museologist, and amateur photographer and artist. His work in Anthropology centered on Melanesia, a subregion in Oceania, and he was the Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, from 1957 until 1992. His work in Oceania has helped build both the collections and research capabilities in the Field Museum and has paved the way for further anthropological work on this area by the museum.
Paul J. Smith was an arts administrator, curator, and artist based in New York. Smith was professionally involved with the art, craft, and design fields since the early 1950s and was closely associated with the twentieth-century studio craft movement in the United States. He joined the staff of the American Craftsmen's Council in 1957, and in 1963 was appointed Director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, a position he held for the next 24 years. In September 1987, he assumed the title of Director Emeritus and continued to work as an independent curator and consultant for museums, arts organizations, and collectors.
Daniel J. Robbins was an American art historian, art critic, and curator, who specialized in avant-garde 20th-century art and helped encourage the study of it. Robbins' area of scholarship was on the theoretical and philosophical origins of Cubism. His writings centered on the importance of artists such as Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Jacques Villon. He was a specialist in early Modernism, writing on Salon Cubists and championed contemporaries such as Louise Bourgeois and the Color Field painters. Art historian Peter Brooke referred to Robbins as "the great pioneer of the broader history of Cubism".
Maayan Sheleff is an independent art curator and artist based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Her projects explore social and political issues through participatory practices, at the intersection of art and technology.
Lissant Bolton is an Australian anthropologist and the Keeper of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum. She is particularly known for her work on Vanuatu, textiles, and museums and indigenous communities.
References
- 1 2 Cochrane, Susan; Mel, Michael A. (1997). Contemporary Art in Papua New Guinea. Craftsman House. pp. 57–59. ISBN 9789057032318.
- 1 2 "Joe Nalo". Australian Prints + Printmaking. Centre for Australian Art. Retrieved August 30, 2017.
- ↑ Stanley, Nick (2007). The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific. Berghahn Books. p. 211. ISBN 9780857455727.
- ↑ Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association (Number 25 ed.). 2002. pp. 91, 94.
- ↑ Rosi, Pamela Christine (1994). Bung wantaim: the role of the National Arts School in creating national culture and identity in Papua New Guinea. Bryn Mawr College. p. 432.
- ↑ Kjellgren, Eric (2007). Oceania: Art of the Pacific Islands in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art. p. 109. ISBN 9781588392381.
- ↑ "Altogether: Contemporary Papua New Guinea Art". East–West Center . 2008. Retrieved August 30, 2017.
Papua New Guinea’s independence from Australia in 1975 marked the explosion of a contemporary art movement through which artists explored the visual interpretation of nationalism in this new country of more than 6 million people, which occupies the eastern half of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world. Artists began to conceptualize a new national identity through their art, illustrating what it meant to be a Papua New Guinean as opposed to a clan member.
- ↑ "SPIRIT of the PEOPLE - New Melanesian Art: An exhibition of contemporary art from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands & Vanuatu". Pacific Arts Center. 2009. Retrieved August 30, 2017.