MUSEUM news 44 AT THE PITT RIVERS Oxford—Widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost institutions in the fi elds of anthropology and archaeology, the Pitt Rivers Museum is notable not only for its extensive historical collection but for its ongoing research activity and cultural programming. Among its many forthcoming events, two smaller-format shows are particularly worthy of note. Preserving What is Valued, on view until January 3, 2016, examines how different societies deal with the challenge of repairing objects. It also looks at how restoration is dealt with by professionals, most often in the foreign institutions in which they frequently wind up. The objects included in the exhibition are all drawn from the museum’s collection and many feature ingenious and often beautiful native repairs. ABOVE: Headdress. Brazil. Aldo Lo Curto Collection. © MUDEC, Museo delle Culture, Milan. BELOW: Reliquary guardian fi gure. Kota, Gabon. Alessandro Passaré Collection. © MUDEC, Museo delle Culture, Milan. LEFT: Pre-Columbian textile fragment. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. TOP RIGHT: Paul Gauguin’s palette incised with Oceanic motifs. © Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Photo: Ole Haupt. RIGHT: African ivory bracelets with native repairs. © Pitt Rivers Museum. Another small show, My Siberian Year, 1914–1915, is on view until February 28, 2016. The title refl ects that of the book by Polish anthropologist Marie Antoinette Czaplicka, published by Mills & Boon in 1916, which is about the expedition in Siberia she led on behalf of Oxford University and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The show celebrates the centennial of this expedition, which was mainly devoted to the study of the Evenks peoples. The installation presents photographs and relevant objects, many fi eld collected by Czaplicka. PERMANENT COLLECTIONS Milan—In last spring’s issue, we discussed Africa, la terra degli spiriti, the temporary inaugural exhibition of the Museo delle Culture in Milan (MUDEC), and its importance as an example of the rich and diverse programming that this new venue for encounters between cultures and communities promises to provide. This fall, MUDEC was back in the headlines with the October 28 unveiling of its permanent collection, which includes more than seven thousand traditional artworks from around the world with diverse provenances and from many different epochs. Almost all of it is accessible to the public, both in the exhibition galleries and in the museum’s storage, which can be visited by appointment. Although the setting is new, the collection consists mostly of material accumulated over the last two hundred years through donations by missionaries, explorers, and Milanese collectors. In some cases, these objects had been housed in some of the city’s public institutions, such as the Museo Patrio Archeologico de Brera, the Museo Artistico Municipale, and the Museo di Storia Naturale. A signifi cant number of works was more recently donated while the present museum was under construction. Through its exploration of the world’s civilizations and the diversity of their art coupled with the local and historical nature of its collection, MUDEC presents an opportunity to learn about Milan’s centuries-old relationship with “otherness.” Two exhibitions likely to interest tribal art afi cionados are on view there until February 21, 2016: Gauguin. Racconti dal paradiso (Gauguin: Stories from Paradise) and A Beautiful Confl uence, Anni e Josef Albers e l’America Latina. The latter examines the relationships between the creations of the German, Bauhaus-trained artist couple and the Pre-Columbian objects they collected after they moved to the American continent.
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