A fine Eastern Pende Panya-Gombe African mask. Coll.: David Norden |
UCLA Fowler Museum presents "Spanning centuries of multicultural creativity, this
exhibition is the kind of art experience that might restore your faith in the
sad old human comedy. How nice that the installation is on long-term view."
The Fowler
Museum is located in the heart of UCLA's north campus. Fowler
Museum at UCLA more informations: Stacey Ravel Abarbanel, staceyraATarts.ucla.edu(310) 825-4288 Los Angeles museum-goers will at last have an ongoing opportunity to enjoy one of America’s most important collections of non-Western art. Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives—opening September 30, 2006 at UCLA’s Fowler Museum—will feature approximately 250 of the finest objects from the Fowler’s collections in a long-term exhibition that celebrates the richness of world arts and considers the roles these works of art play in peoples’ lives. The outstanding examples of global artistic achievement featured in Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives are primarily from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas, and they range in date from the first millennium B.C.E. to the present. The exhibition opens with five premier objects that give visitors a taste of the breadth and quality of what will follow:
Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives is organized thematically to encourage visitors to contemplate how art exacts wonder, imparts wisdom, and tangibly affects people’s lives around the world. An introductory video directed by Peter Kirby enlivens the objects with first-person accounts by artists, scholars, religious practitioners, and people of various cultures who offer insights into their relationships with the works of art on display. Three video kiosks offer more in-depth perspectives on artists, objects, and their performances. For example, video presentations explore the role of katsina dolls in the education of Hopi children, ancestral stories encoded in clan house paintings of Papua New Guinea, royal pageantry in Cameroon, Potlatch ceremonies on the Pacific Northwest Coast, and commentaries by ceramist Magdalene Odundo and santos carver Felix Lopez. A central gallery within a gallery, entitled ‘Fowler in Focus,’ is dedicated to rotating installations of new acquisitions, sub-collections, and particular artistic genres. Changing three times per year, ‘Fowler in Focus’ will debut with seventy-seven intricate Indian oil lamps and incense burners, followed approximately four months later by a selection of twenty-four Zambian masks. This space along with other rotating displays will ensure that Intersections will provide fresh experiences for repeat visitors.
In many cultures, art plays an integral role in defining and asserting power. The works presented in this third section have been used to declare political authority, negotiate gender relationships, or express status and prestige. It features a large, awe-inspiring 19th-century carved wooden royal mask (one of only a dozen known to exist) from the Bamileke peoples of Cameroon, along with other examples of intricately carved chief’s stools and headdresses, beaded gourds, figures, and masks from the Cameroon Grasslands kingdoms. Also on view are masks and headdresses made by First Nation peoples from the Pacific Northwest, and a large wall display of jewelry and other prestige objects from around the world. A final gallery explores art objects that play a critical role in facilitating transformations. Here a selection of retablos from Mexico, a priest’s staff from Indonesia, power figures from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Japanese ema plaques show how objects are used to connect with the divine and to structure devotion both individually and communally. In almost all the cultures discussed in this section, death is viewed as a transition to the next world, and the art on display, such as ceramics from west Mexico and masks worn during mourning and funerary rites from Gabon and New Ireland, are often integral to this final transformation. At the end of this section, an elegant ceramic vessel by Kenyan-born artist Magdalene Odundo, a large-scale painting by Haitian-American Edouard Duval-Carrié, an installation of life-sized papier-mâché figures by Mexican artist Felipe Linares, and the 1994 sculptural work, ‘Apartheid’s Funeral’ by South African artist Johannes Segogela show how contemporary works reflect dynamic social, political, and cultural transformations. Throughout the exhibition, several ‘Objects of Encounter’ offer opportunities for more in-depth study, particularly of the ways artistic production in global cultures is constantly evolving and responding to contemporary realities. A box made by the Mangbetu/Zande peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in late 19th–early 20th century provides a platform to consider how early encounters between Africans and Europeans created market demands that transformed artistic production. In another example, an elaborately beaded crown made in the 1990s by New York artist José Rodriguez for use in Afro-Cuban Yoruba initiation ceremonies reflects how African traditions are sustained and reinvented in the diaspora. Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives is made possible by lead gifts from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Getty Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation, and Barbara and Joseph Goldenberg. Major support was provided by Patricia B. Altman, Margit and Lloyd Cotsen, Jay and Deborah Last, the National Endowment for the Arts, Shirley and Ralph Shapiro, the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, the Patricia and Richard Anawalt Family, and Shani and Milady, daughters of William T. Perry, Esq. Additional support was provided by the Aaroe Associates Charitable Foundation, Anonymous, the Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles, Jill and Barry Kitnick, Jim and Jeanne Pieper, the Ceil and Michael Pulitzer Foundation, and Edwin and Cherie Silver. (Only gifts of $10,000 and above are listed here.) Fowler Museum History Our current facility was built especially for the Museum on UCLA’s north campus and features approximately 20,000-square-feet of exhibition space. It opened in September 1992, named in recognition of lead support by the Fowler Foundation and the family of collector and inventor Francis E. Fowler, Jr. The Fowler's collections comprise more than 150,000 art and ethnographic and 600,000 archaeological objects representing prehistoric, historic, and contemporary cultures of Africa, Native and Latin America, and Asia and the Pacific. Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives marks the first time that audiences will have an ongoing opportunity to explore the highlights of these holdings. In addition, the Museum will continue its rotating temporary exhibition program. The Sir Henry Wellcome Collection at the Fowler Museum Visiting the Fowler |
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