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Description: | The third largest ethnography collection (after the British Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum) in the UK with about 80,000 items, this continues to be extended and researched, with a programme of collecting and commissioning new objects.
a. The African Collection (22,000 objects) covers virtually every modern African state with a huge variety of material encompassing many different lifestyles, from hunter-gathering and farming to urban life. From the 1950s systematic collections were built up from the Sua of Zaire, the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Botswana, the Tuareg of Algeria, the Samburu of Kenya and the people of the Cross-River area of Nigeria. More recent collections include video footage and photos. Objects of outstanding quality include important historical and archaeological material from Egypt, Benin and Ethiopia, collected early in the Museum's history. Other exceptional pieces include two Afo figures donated by Ruxton in 1931; an Ibibio figure with suspended sword, groups of African masks from Yoruba and the Dogon of Mali and collections of contemporary pottery. Noteworthy contemporary African art includes life-size cement sculptures by Sunday Jack Akpan, paintings by Osi Audu and metal sculpture by Sokari Douglas Camp. Recent collecting has concentrated on illustrating contemporary masquerade from countries that are not well represented in other UK museums. These collections include material from the Dogon of Mali; the Bundouku region of Cote d' Ivoire and an Ijele from Nigeria. Field workers are encouraged to commission new works by acknowledged makers rather than remove existing works from circulation.
b. The American collections were built from purchases, including the Inuit and Northwest coast collections made by AC Haddon and donated to the Museum by Emslie Horniman. Other important donations of American material, include pre-Columbian archaeological pieces from central Mexico and Oaxaca. John Eric Horniman, Emslie's son, made an excellent collection of Plains Indian beaded material, including clothing, pipe bags and a bonnet, while items transferred from other institutions include 59 Northwest coast pieces from the Museum of the American Indian, New York (1934), two Kwatiutl masks and related material from the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew (1958), and purchases such as a collection of Inuit seal skin clothing from the Church Missionary Society (1965). In 1961 the Museum acquired a Blackfoot Tipi, transferred from the Glenbow Museum, Canada. During the last 50 years, the main focus of research and collecting has been on the American Southwest, in particular Navajo textiles, Pueblo ceramics and Hopi Katsinam. The Museum has also sponsored contemporary North American Indian artists. In 1966, Fred Stevens, a Navajo medicine man executed a sand painting in the museum, while in 1985 Nathan Jackson, of the Tlingit people of Alaska, carved and presented the Museum with a 25ft totem pole.
c. The Asian collections (about 32,000 items) are particularly rich in art, including carvings of gods, masks and puppets, and other items of material culture from India, China, Japan, Sri Lanka and Burma. Many of the Indian and Japanese objects were part of Frederic Horniman's original collection and include important examples of stone sculpture (depicting, for example, Hanuman, Ganesha, and Jain figures), ritual objects and Japanese, Chinese and Indian costumes. There are also architectural pieces such as archways and doors from India. Many of the objects within the Asian collection were acquired through purchase by Frederick or John Emslie Horniman from international exhibitions such as the Great Exhibition (1851), the India and Colonial Exhibition (1886), the Vienna Exhibition (1889) and the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition (1910), were purchased in the course of their world travels, while others came through dealers and auction houses or with the assistance of agents and acquaintances. The collections have been further increased in the 20th Century through systematic field collecting carried out by curators and other anthropologists. Notable groups are the Andaman, Maldive, Borneo and Naga collections. In the last 15 years probably the largest collection of Asian tents in the United Kingdom has been assembled at the Museum by a former curator, Ken Teague. The Museum has also developed the collection in the area of performance, acquiring puppets and masks from Nepal, Japan, Sri Lanka, China and Central Asia.
d. A unique aspect of this collection is that it contains substantial and important folk art collections from western and central Europe as well as Scandinavia. Until recently, the Horniman has been the only museum in the UK committed to research in this area.
e. Frederick Horniman was an avid collector of European folk art, acquiring examples of craftwork which were in danger of being lost as a result of industrialisation and urbanisation. From 1901-1947, little European material entered the Museum but since then, donations from England, Romania and the Balkans have enhanced the collections. Notable among these are extensive holdings of textiles, costume, wooden utensils, paintings on glass, agricultural and domestic implements, puppet theatres and masks from Romania, Poland, Norway and the Tyrol region.
f. The core of the Pacific collections was assembled under Alfred Cort Haddon, an eminent scholar of Oceania who was Advisory Curator 1903-1915. The material is from all the region's three sub-areas, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, with a particularly strong focus on Papua New Guinea. Although only about 3,000 artefacts, these collections are distinguished by the particularly fine quality of the objects and the important source collections from which many of them were derived. Within the Pacific collection there are notable holdings from the Bismarck Archipelago, two chalk figures and five tatuana masks from New Ireland, extensive Papuan Gulf material including gope boards, items of personal decoration and so on. The collection contains two Solomon Island canoes, three particularly fine anthropomorphic prow ornaments, a Cook Island canoe and models and canoe attachments from elsewhere in the Pacific. Recently the museum has obtained a collection of Baining masks from the 1950s and 1970s used in night ceremonies and a well documented field collection, including video footage and photographic documentation, of 13 uvol headdresses from the Melkoy people. This last collection is one of only two of its type in the United Kingdom and forms part of the original van Bussal collection shared between the Museum of African and Oceanic Art, Paris, the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Stuttgart and the Royal Albert Museum, Exeter. With few exceptions, the items in the Pacific collections are of outstanding quality. The range of ancestor figures, masks, ceremonial boards and other items together provide a solid general survey of traditional art and material culture from the region. | Subjects: | Ethnography World Cultures People | Source: | Cornucopia - Discovering UK Collections | FAX: | +44 (0)20 8291 5506 | Telephone: | 020 8699 1872 | Identifier: | oai:www.cornucopia.org.uk:5368 | Go to resource |
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