MUSEUM NEWS
72
LEFT:
National Museum of the American
Indian, Smithsonian Institution,
inv. 9/3427.
Three masks depicting
Tumaneq (air spirits).
Attributed to Ikamrailnguq,
Napaskiaq, Kuskokwim River,
Alaska. C. 1900.
ABOVE RIGHT:
Fowler Museum at UCLA,
inv. X65.4035.
LEFT:
Menil Collection, Houston, collection
of Adelaide de Menil and Edmund
Carpenter, inv. A7626.
Finally Reunited
ANCHORAGE—A story of long-lost things coming back
together after more than a century is unfolding in Anchorage,
Alaska. Yup’ik masks generally are representations
created by shamans, transcribing their visions or
dreams. They are often destroyed after ceremonies, but
at the end of the nineteenth century, some were traded
instead, and some found their way to museums in Washington,
D.C. (the Smithsonian National Museum of the
American Indian), Los Angeles (the Fowler Museum),
and Houston (the Menil Collection). Today three of these
masks, which represent the directions of the wind, have
been reunited for a special installation at the Anchorage
Museum, while the search continues for the last element
of this quartet.
Fondation Opale
LENS—Opening on June 9, 2019, and on view through
the end of March 2020, an exhibition titled Before Time
Began will be at the Fondation Opale. This is the inaugural
show of a new venue for the sharing of cultural art,
located in the snowy, high-altitude environment of Lens,
Switzerland. This show is on contemporary Aboriginal
painting and examines the question of the origins of this
art form that is simultaneously traditional and contemporary,
since it echoes ancestral knowledge and belief while
at the same time exploring social issues of the present.
This mixing of past and present also represents a way
for artists and viewers to evoke dream-time, both as a
process of creation and as an ideology.