Tribal Art London 2015

The “tribal art season” is coming again to London. From September 2–5, the 2015 edition of Tribal Art London will be held at the Mall Galleries with nineteen international participants specialized in the non-European arts, including four new ones: Gallery Lemaire from Amsterdam and Handbury Tribal Art, Kenn MacKay, and Sabine & Anderson from the UK. Well-known Oceanic art dealer Wayne Heathcote will also return to the show this year.

For more information and to view the salon catalogue, visit the Tribal Art London website.

Oceanic Art Auction at Theodore Bruce

Australian auctioneers Theodore Bruce will present a sale of Oceanic art and artifacts on Monday, August 17 in Sydney. Showcasing the collection of Todd Barlin, the sale will feature a multitude of weapons, ornaments, shields and ritual items from Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia, the Philippine Islands, and elsewhere.

For more information, view the online catalogue.

Hair comb with head finial  -  Fly River, Papua New Guinea

Image courtesy of Theodore Bruce Auctioneers

Insecta - Le royaume des insectes

Enter the strange universe of insects through Insecta - Le royaume des insectes, a temporary exhibition conceived and realized by the Royal Museums for Art and History and currently on view at the Royal Palace of Brussels. Insecta invites visitors to discover the many representations of insects in the world of art, literature and cinema, and to admire the treasures of Belgium's federal collections, revealing hundreds of works of art dating from prehistoric to modern times and hailing from Egypt to Belgium, Africa and Asia.  Open through September 6, 2015.

For more information, visit the exhibition's website.

L'Inca et le Conquistador

L’Inca et le conquistador (The Inca and the Conquistador), a new exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly, uses artistic creations by the Inca and by the Spanish to tell both sides of the story of the conquest of Peru and to illustrate the confrontations that resulted from contact between two radically different worlds. Conceived by curator Paz Núnez-Regueiro, the exhibition focuses on two protagonists, the Inca sovereign Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, whose interactions provoked a profound political, economic, cultural, and religious revolution in both of their empires. The paintings, weapons, textiles, gold objects, ceramics, maps, and engravings, mostly from the museum’s own collection, together tell this epic story and shed light on this mutual encounter with the “other.”

View the exhibition's official website.

Gold figurine  -  Inca, Peru  -  15th–16th century 

Portrait of Huayna Capac, Inca XII

Portrait of Atahualpa, Inca XIV

Male figure  -  Inca, Peru  -  15th–16th century

Fowler in Focus: The Art of Hair in Africa

The Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles has opened a new exhibition presenting an array of finely sculpted combs and hairpins from Africa and its diasporas, along with the film Me Broni Ba/My White Baby by Ghanaian-American filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu. It explores the notions of ideal beauty and social status associated with hair among many African cultures. The juxtaposition of traditional hairpins and combs made from rare materials with an avant-garde contemporary film raises questions about constructions of identity in Africa from the colonial period to today.

View the official exhibition website.

Comb  -  Probably Djuka, Surinam  -  20th century

Comb  -  Asante, Ghana  -  ca 1900

Comb  -  Chokwe, D.R. Congo

Images courtesy of the Fowler Museum, UCLA

Arts du Nigeria révisites

Without aspiring to exhaustively detail the cultural production of Nigeria across its 2000-year history, the collection at the Musée Barbier-Mueller is very rich in several respects. Faithful to chronological continuity, it provides a sample of the production of the major cultural centers of Nigeria, shedding light on archaeological pieces from Nok, Katsina, and Sokoto, works from Ife and the kingdom of Benin, and Yoruba, Ijo, and Igbo objects, as well as items from the Cross River and the Benue Valley. By virtue of their rarity, certain pieces in the collection constitute “monuments” of African art. Others, by their emblematic force, are among its great “classics.” Arts du Nigeria révisites, on view through January 17, 2016, sets out to present these remarkable objects, highlighting their aesthetic qualities while explaining, by means of the exhibition's accompanying catalogue, the ethnographic context of their production and use.

To find out more, visit the official exhibition website.

Worship fan  -  Yoruba

Head depicting a woman  -  Ife

Helmet mask  -  Igbo

Head crest  -  Afo

Images courtesy of the Musée Barbier-Mueller

Shifting Patterns: Pacific Barkcloth Clothing

Shifting Patterns: Pacific Barkcloth Clothing, on view at the British Museum until August 16, 2015, features seventy-seven examples of clothing, headgear, masks, and ornaments from New Guinea to Easter Island, by way of Hawaii and New Zealand. The show’s curators place emphasis on the objects’ traditional social and cultural contexts but also examine how more recent developments associated with colonization have altered their forms and uses.

Visit the official exhibition website.

Hula dancers from the Hālau Nā Kipuʻupuʻu group, Kaʻauea, Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian Islands, 2011, Dino Morrow

Cloth  -  Hawaiian Islands