CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Traditional Oceanic Art
Art of the Pacific Islands made before and alongside colonial contact, from Melanesian masks to Polynesian feather cloaks and stone moai.
No works indexed yet
No open-access works for Traditional Oceanic Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The Pacific islands were settled in stages over tens of thousands of years, and their art reflects both shared ancestry and long separation. New Guinea and nearby islands were reached more than 40,000 years ago; Lapita potters, ancestors of the Polynesians, pushed eastward from about 1300 BC; and voyagers reached Hawai'i, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa New Zealand by around 1300 AD. Before European contact, artists worked without metal, using stone, shell, bone and fire to shape wood, fibre, feathers, barkcloth and greenstone.
Much of this work carries rank, ancestry and spiritual power. Māori carvers filled meeting houses with ancestor figures with shell-inlaid eyes; Hawaiian chiefs wore cloaks of thousands of red and yellow feathers; and on Rapa Nui, stone moai stood on platforms facing inland. In Melanesia, carvers from Vanuatu to the Solomon Islands made slit drums, shell-inlaid canoe figureheads and masks for initiation and funerals. Marshall Islanders built stick charts that map ocean swells.
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