One of the hightlights of the week end was to walk through the "new" gallery for Oceanic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it reopened in 2007). In the early 70's, the Met commissioned 24 Kwoma artists to paint the panels needed to make the roof of a tipical ceremonial house. The Kwoma are a group of people living in the northeastern part of New Guinea. Most Kwoma villages have at least one ceremonial house where rituals take place. They consist of a roof supported by posts and the sides are left open. This roof in the gallery is over 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, and is composed of more than 270 individual paintings on bark-like panels, painted by those 24 artists..
That should be plenty to get me started on textile designs, right there...
I also loved the line patterns on these bark clothes from Futuna Island:
and those amazing totems:
All I can say here is WOW! Those are stunning and very inspiring!
ReplyDeleteI know, amazing! the mass of them is particulary stunning..
ReplyDelete