BOOKS P I L A T 2013: 150 A Look at the Prize Winners This is the fifth year that the winners of the Prix International du Livre d’Art Tribal (PILAT) have been announced (and applauded) at the cocktail party at Sotheby’s on the eve of their winter sale. On December 6, the award for the best English-language book went to Eyes of the Ancestors, edited by Reimar Schefold, an exceptional publication on the history of Indonesian tribal art, which focuses on the outstanding collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. For the French language award, for the first time the jury selected a book published by a gallery: Côte d’Ivoire: Premiers regards sur la sculpture 1850–1935 (Côte d’Ivoire: First Encounters with Sculpture 1850–1935). Produced by Parisian Galerie Schoffel Valluet and authored by Bertrand Goy, the work is based on rigorous archival research and sheds fascinating light on the history of the traditional arts of Côte d’Ivoire and their discovery by early French colonial agents. Along with the prizes for these two publications, which are discussed in greater detail in the author interviews below, the jury also awarded a special prize to Editions Dapper in recognition of its exemplary contributions as a publisher and of its most recent exhibition catalog, Charles Ratton. L’invention des arts « primitifs » (Philippe Dagen, ed.), calling it “love at first sight.” This special prize is a new designation conceived to honor a work that is destined to become an important reference and that had particularly caught the jury’s attention. More than ever before, PILAT 2013 was greeted enthusiastically by the publishers and authors it honored. It clearly attested to the high quality of publications being produced in the field of tribal art. By Elena Martínez-Jacquet Reimar Schefold Eyes of the Ancestors Tribal Art Magazine: This book is based on an exceptional museum collection. How would you define it, and what from it did you want to emphasize? Reimar Schefold: The art of Indonesia that the general public is acquainted with is that which is shown at exhibitions that focus on the region’s rich Hindu-Javanese heritage, which gave rise to grandiose monuments such as Borobudur and includes the wayang kulit shadow puppet play, Batik textiles, and the colorful high culture of the island of Bali. The tribal art from many cultures on other islands of the archipelago is much less well known, but there are noteworthy collections of it, one of which is at the Dallas Museum of Art. It is of FIG. 1 (above): Cover of the winner in the English category, Eyes of the Ancestors, edited by Reimar Schefold in collaboration with Steven G. Alpert. Featuring contributions by Steven G. Alpert, George Ellis, Nico de Jonge, Vernon Kedit, Reimar Schefold, Achim Sibeth, and Roxana Waterson. Dallas Museum of Art/Yale University Press, New Haven and London. FIGS. 2A, B, and C (left to right): Pages 184–185, 204–205, and 38–39 from Eyes of the Ancestors. astonishing quality and attests to the richness of the many local artistic traditions, which in most cases have now disappeared. Thanks to visionaries like Steven G. Alpert and the enthusiasm of donors like Margaret McDermott, this collection is now accessible to the public and can also help the descendants of the cultures in question become better acquainted with their past. Eyes of the Ancestors strives to document this artistic wealth for
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