This winter, the San Diego Museum of Art is proud to present two major exhibitions that highlight artistic masterpieces from Africa and Oceania. Organized by SDMA Oceanic Art: A Celebration of Form—on view through 3 January 2010—presents nearly 100 works of art from the South Pacific Islands, a geographical region broadly defined by scholars as Oceania.
Simultaneously, Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body, organized by the Hood Museum of Art, will be on view at SDMA from 31 January to 26 April 2009.
Black Womanhood is the first major exhibition to explore the direct relationship between historic and contemporary representations of the black female body as they have been expressed in both traditional African and modern Western art.
“Establishing a more vivid and encyclopedic representation of the global artistic practice has been a goal of recent work at the museum,” said Derrick R. Cartwright, executive director. “I expect our visitors to be captivated by both of these exhibitions which bring new scholarly perspectives and stunning objects to SDMA.”
Oceanic Art: A Celebration of Form
Curated by George Ellis, director emeritus of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Oceanic Art: A Celebration of Form features 97 three-dimensional works, primarily from Melanesia and Polynesia, but the exhibition also includes objects from Micronesia and Taiwan. Works on view come from three major California collections: the renowned personal collections of Valerie Franklin and Edward and Mina Smith Collection, as well as the extensive holdings of the Sana Art Foundation.
The exhibition includes a variety of three-dimensional objects, including sculptures, traditional adornments, weapons, and objects used in everyday life. Many of these are encoded with cultural and social meanings, some of which still function within certain Oceanic cultures today. The exhibition will display the works in groups that not only allude to their original daily uses but also provide for rich cross-examination of the variety of contexts in which these objects functioned.
Oceanic Art highlights an exceptional gathering of diverse works, including a rare life-size sculpture from Nuku‘oro in the Caroline Islands (Micronesia), the only such figure in a private collection. Elaborate hand-carved sculptures, exquisite architectural elements, and several striking figures from New Ireland, Admiralty or Manus Islands, and a rare Easter Island (Rapa Nui) carved figures will also be on view.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated, 128-page scholarly catalogue written by George Ellis and published by the San Diego Museum of Art. The essay contains a current perspective on Pacific cultures, their diversity and struggles within a colonial context, and a fresh view of these traditional and contemporary arts. -- www.sdmart.org
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