‘COAXING THE SPIRITS TO DANCE’ AT METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

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NEW YORK CITY — The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting the exhibition “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf,” through December 2.

The powerful and graphically elaborate sculpture from the Papuan Gulf area of the island of New Guinea is presented in a context that demonstrates how deeply embedded art was in the region’s social life in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

The exhibition presents traditional sculptures in the form of masks, figures and spirit boards that both represented and became the embodiment of supernatural beings that were placated, cajoled and coaxed to attend to human needs. The exhibition focuses on these sacred objects and the contexts in which they were presented.

The juxtaposition of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century photographs with the stylistically inventive sculptures — many specifically identifiable in the photographs — presents the cultural contexts of the objects and facilitates the presentation of culturally specific ideas while creating a visual biography of the works.

The selection of rare historical photographs — some exhibited for the first time — taken by early travelers to the Papuan Gulf is drawn from The Photograph Study Collection of The Metropolitan Museum’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. It was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is accompanied by a catalog.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org.