LACMA

Ahmanson, Level 1: Artworks on view

LACMA in 2008 acquired one of the most significant collections of the art of the Pacific assembled in the twentieth century. Representing the region’s wide range of arts and focusing particularly on works from Polynesia and Melanesia, the collection includes a superb eighteenth-century Hawaiian drum collected by Captain James Cook in 1778, an Easter Islands dance paddle, and a hermaphrodite ancestor figure from Papua New Guinea. This extraordinary collection is on view in galleries designed by contemporary artist Franz West.

Papua New Guinea, Biwat People

The Eyes of New Ireland Province

November 24, 2009

. . . The operculum is a convex rounded plate that serves as the trapdoor on the shell of a number of marine snails and some land ones too, protecting the snails from predators and from drying out. The operculum has a smooth side and a rough side. Set into a sculpted face of approximately human dimensions, as some long-ago artist discovered and many others would confirm, an operculum with the smooth side out makes an uncannily convincing eye: soft, three-dimensional, with an irislike ring of color around a glossy dark center . . .

Got Tea?

September 16, 2009

Yesterday I strolled into the not-yet-installed Art of the Pacific galleries to check out a neat project in progress. In collaboration with Franz West, Viennese artist Andreas Reiter Raabe and two assistants are painting the walls with a tea wash. The idea is that tea played an important role in the featured cultures and, additionally, that the faint green color would be an interesting enhancement to the show . . .

Rethinking Oceanic Art

April 1, 2009

At a presentation I attended last month at LACMA, scholars and leading art historians gathered to talk about the museum’s new Oceanic art collection and consider different ways to present it. It was a provocative discussion. Christina Hellmich, a curator of New Guinea and Oceanic art at the de Young, presented an interesting point of view. She quoted a Michael Kimmelman review in which he said, “Objects are not static; they are the accumulation of all their meanings” . . .