ST. LOUIS, May 21, 2021—The Saint Louis Art Museum recently reopened five galleries devoted to Oceanic art after an extensive renovation and a reinstallation of the museum’s renowned collection of art from the Pacific islands.
The museum is one of a few encyclopedic art museums in the nation that maintains and displays Oceanic art as an active component of its program.
(To download images of art in the installation, click on the images at the bottom of this press release.)
Around 52,000 years ago, seafarers from southeast Asia sailed by canoe across the Pacific Ocean and settled on the continent that would later separate to become the land masses known today as Australia and New Guinea. Some 5,000 years ago, a subsequent group of voyagers from what is now southern Taiwan progressively settled the numerous archipelagos of the Pacific, eventually settling the islands of Polynesia between the years 300-1000.
Gallery 109 draws attention to this history and the importance of the sea in informing the worldview of and arts created by Pacific peoples with a display of small-scale canoes. Constructed from wood and reflecting the same technical components as their full-scale counterparts, these model canoes incorporate precious materials such as shells and feathers. Because canoes transported the founders of the different societies across the Pacific, representations of and references to canoes are prominent in Oceanic art and life.
Much of the art on view—including masks, figure sculpture, and architectural elements dating from the 19th and 20th centuries—acknowledges those founding ancestors or their most influential descendants-turned-ancestors in a particular lineage. This intersection between art and honoring ancestors is explored geographically, through an introduction to art from Melanesia in Gallery 106, extending to an in-depth focus on art from Papua New Guinea—the strength of the museum’s Oceanic collection—in Gallery 107. Gallery 108 features sculpture, adornments, and domestic arts from Polynesia.
Gallery 103 features historical and contemporary Aboriginal art from across Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. Geometric carvings and paintings using a range of surfaces—bark sheets, wooden poles, and canvas—appear in the museum’s galleries for the first time in nearly 20 years. A group of artworks from the collection of Gerald R. and Mary Reid Brunstrom provides a focused view on textiles and paintings from the Central Desert community of Utopia. Ms. Brunstrom operated Austral Gallery in St. Louis from 1988 to 2000.
The Oceanic galleries were co-curated by Nichole N. Bridges, the Morton D. May Curator of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas and guest curator Philippe Peltier, former head and senior curator of the Oceania and Insulindia unit, Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, with Amy Clark, senior research assistant. The Australian installation was co-curated by Bridges and Alexander Brier Marr, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Native American Art.
CONTACT: Matthew Hathaway, 314.655.5493, matthew.hathaway@slam.org
Press images for Oceanic art reinstallation
Click on any of the images in this gallery to download.
