FIG. 16 (below):
Installation view of Atea.
Courtesy of The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
90
museum to record a series of chants that honor
the four principal Hawaiian deities. Their present
day voices link us back to the beginning of
the exhibition, to Lono, immersed in the deep,
thick darkness of the ancestral night, and speak
to the origins of life—and light—that were
drawn from within it.
Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia
Through October 27, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
metmuseum.org
The winter 2019 edition of the Met Bulletin focuses
on the exhibition in more detail and is available from
metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/mma-bulletins.
NOTES
1. This monumental fi gural sculpture is on loan from the
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. The rare
sculpture was the gift of Stephen W. Phillips in 1918, who
acquired it from the London dealer William O. Oldman.
Prior to entering Oldman’s collection, the fi gure had stood
for more than fi fty years in a garden house at Old Garden
Cliff near Gravesend in Kent, England. See also Christina
Hellmich, “The Pacifi c Collection in the Peabody Essex
Museum, Salem, Massachusetts,” in Pacifi c Arts, no. 13/14
(July 1996): 69–84; 78.
2. On loan from The Field Museum, Chicago; ex collection
Capt. A. W. F. Fuller (until 1958). See Roger Neich,
“Tongan Figures: From Goddesses to Missionary Trophies to
Masterpieces,” in Journal of the Polynesian Society, Special
Issue: Polynesian Art: Histories and Meanings in Cultural
Contexts, vol. 116, no. 2 (June 2007): 213–268; 222–223.
ART ON VIEW
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