Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia

Art from the Pacific Islands, from Lapita pottery and Sepik carving to Micronesian navigation, Polynesian barkcloth and contemporary artists.

No works indexed yet · 8 related artists

No open-access works for Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

The first settlers of Remote Oceania carried Lapita pottery, stamped with fine toothed patterns, across the western Pacific about three thousand years ago. In Melanesia, carvers along the Sepik River in New Guinea made ancestral figures, hooks and house boards, New Ireland artists carved openwork malagan sculptures for funeral rites, and Vanuatu is known for towering upright slit drums. Micronesian navigators used stick charts in the Marshall Islands to map swells.

Polynesian art prizes surface and status. Hawaiian chiefs wore cloaks of thousands of feathers, Tongan and Samoan women beat and printed barkcloth known as ngatu and siapo, and Rapa Nui carvers raised the moai. Tattoo is itself a major art. European visitors such as Paul Gauguin projected their own fantasies onto Tahiti. Contemporary Pacific artists, including the Niuean-born John Pule, who paints in the manner of barkcloth, reclaim those histories on their own terms.