kutamaya

Traditional arts and material culture

While Papua is home to a wide variety of art traditions, only several iconic forms are well known outside their local regions. European explorers, administrators and collectors often returned from Papua with extensive collections of material culture. These early visitors, together with more recent arrivals, have profoundly affected the production of art and its place in the lives of many Papuans. While there is a significant collection of Papuan artefacts in the Museum Nasional in Jakarta (www.museumnasional.org), and very modest collections at the Museum Provinsi (Provincial Museum) in Waena/Jayapura (www.kebudayaan.depdiknas.go.id/BudayaOnline/SitusBcb/Museum/n_papua.htmwww.wereldmuseum.rotterdam.nl) in Rotterdam and the Tropenmuseum of the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (the Museum of the Royal Institute for the Tropics, or KIT) in Amsterdam, hold the most significant institutional collections in Papuan art and material culture anywhere in the world. Unfortunately most of these objects are not on permanent exhibition, although many items in the National Museum of Ethnology collection may now be viewed online (www.rmv.nl). In 2003, the RMV opened an exhibition featuring recent and past material culture collections from the Kamoro region of southern Papua. Although "Papua Leeft" had a web presence in 2003, the only information that remains online about this exhibition appears to be references to the printed catalogue Kamoro Art: Tradition and Innovation in a New Guinea culture and news/reviews of the exhibition (such as www.westpapua.nl/2003_02/kamoro.html). Similarly, although the KIT hosted a small exhibition of photographs from the early Twentieth Century related to the Anglo-Dutch race to the tropical glaciers of Carstensz (Puncak Jaya), the exhibition catalogue Race to the Snow remains the only enduring web presence of this exhibition (purchase from KIT at www.kit.nl). *1 In 2007, the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam will host a major pan-New Guinea exhibition, titled "The Power of Papua".

The best known Papuan art is the woodcarving of the Asmat people and in the past few decades most art development projects, art enthusiasts and dealers collecting in Papua have been drawn to this art form. While the Asmat region may have gained international notoriety in 1962 with the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, it is the sustained support of the Crosier Catholic Missionaries (www.crosier.org) and the patronage of their former Bishop Alphonse Sowada which has been central to revival of Asmat art. In 1973 the Crosiers established the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress at Agats and later the American Museum of Asmat Art (www.asmat.org). Asmat art is featured in several private collections which have a web presence, including that of long-term Asmat art collectors Ursula and Gunter Konrad (www.asmat.de) and the Equatorial Art Gallery website (www.asmatart.net or http://home.earthlink.net/~alkeeney). You can read about an art collector’s experience in Asmat (http://home.earthlink.net/~fchiaramonte/travel.htm).

Papua is rich in many artistic traditions other than those of the Asmat. There are many contemporary artists across the province producing fine works in a variety of media. Several of these artists have been featured in exhibitions by Seichi Okawa and their work can be found at the Graha Budaya Indonesia or Indonesian Cultural Plaza in Tokyo (www.harapan.co.jp/Indonesia/GBI/GBI_index.htm - you need an extended Japanese character set to see all of this site). The arts of Lake Sentani, which have been overlooked by so many visitors to nearby Jayapura, have also been gaining recent popularity among domestic and foreign visitors to Papua. Read about the painted barkcloth of the Sentani region in an article by anthropologist Michael Howard (www.artasiapacific.com/articles/maro/maro1.html with hotlinked footnotes). The internet has many other webpages about New Guinea tribal arts and art dealers (such as www.art-pacific.com/artifacts/nuguinea/asmat/asmatmap.htm). Sarinah, the exclusive Indonesian department store on Jalan Thamrin, was one of the first places to commercialise Asmat art in Jakarta (http://bubu.com/sarinah/asmat.htm) as part of their arts and crafts collection from across the archipelago.