Roots and Journeys

The new gallery of Global Indigenous Arts at the Spencer Museum of Art will explore artistic inspirations gleaned from nature, heritage, and transcendent experiences. From the world’s most ancient types of instruments to the most detailed design techniques, these arts speak to the connections of people to place, the importance of traditions and the essential creativity of the human spirit.

Sculptural works from around the world, such as Abelam carvings from New Guinea, will serve as anchors for discrete segments of the gallery that will host rotations of arts and cultural works from The University of Kansas’ former Ethnographic collections. These collections will be presented in dialogue with new acquisitions and rarely seen works from the Spencer Museum of Arts collections to create new synergies and thought provoking engagements.

The first rotation, Markets and Migrations in American Indian Arts, will highlight historic and contemporary works from across North America, presented in visually stimulating pairings, in order to capture the imagination and illuminate the complexities of history made personal through artistic explorations.

Please join us in the Spring to welcome these indigenous works to our galleries. We look forward to sharing our African and Oceanic arts in future rotations within this gallery space.

Public Programs

3.11

Lecture and Reception: Gwyneira Isaac, Curator of North American Ethnology, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

4:00pm / SMA Auditorium

Object 2.0: New Paradigms in the Interpretation of Ethnographic Collections. For the past twenty years, I have worked in and engaged with local and national museums both here and in the UK. The museum world I entered in the early 1990s is a far cry from the one I now inhabit. Making sense of these changes requires grappling with practical and political shifts, as well as the theoretical ones that have shaped what takes place on the ground in museums. In some ways, we have been far too narrow in the ways in which we think about the interpretation of ethnographic objects—in recent years we have constantly reverted to debates about categorizing objects based on differences between Euro-American and Indigenous ontologies, distinguishing the ‘us’ vs. ‘other’ and highlighting the tension between collectors on the one hand, and the source communities on the other—or as is the case in some museums, between anthropologists and art historians, insiders and outsiders, or the emic vs. etic viewpoints. These perspectives are largely internal to museums. How we relate to objects more generally, however, largely takes place outside of the museum and this is what I will explore—a history of the disconnecting and reconnecting forces that have separated and then subsequently brought people and objects together in new ways, both within and across cultures.
The talk will be followed by a reception in the Central Court.

3.12

POSTPONED - Dialogue: Roots and Journeys: Where Have We Been and Where are We Going? A Dialogue about the past, present and future of indigenous arts and cultures in museums.

Postponed / We look forward to hosting this dialogue in the near future. Please check back for updates.

The last 20 years have witnessed significant changes in the collection, study and presentation of art and material culture of indigenous peoples in museum contexts. As the Spencer Museum of Art continues the process of incorporating the ethnographic holdings of The University of Kansas into exhibition and educational programs we are seeking to facilitate a dialogue between diverse and unique perspectives on the history, meaning, and value of these collections as a reflection of broader trends in collecting, display and interpretive practices. This dialogue will bring together museum professionals, scholars, artists and community leaders to explore shifting perspectives on indigenous cultural materials in contemporary museums. Organized by Nancy Mahaney, Curator of Arts and Cultures of the Americas, Africa and Oceania and Celka Straughn, Andrew W. Mellon Director of Academic Programs.

Organized by Nancy Mahaney, Curator of Arts and Cultures of the Americas, Africa and Oceania