Posts from the ‘South America’ Category

Mar 19

Exhibitions Week: Echoes of the Rainforest: The Visual Arts of the Shipibo Indians

The MMWC has a huge amount of exhibition-related news. This week I devote a series of posts to highlighting some of these developments.

I sure wish I could have taken an anthropology course while in high school! Even better would have been an anthropology course that offered my classmates and I the chance to translate our studies into a public museum exhibition. Thankfully such a course is offered at the International School in Indianapolis, where a group of students have worked closely with faculty members Frédéric and Bernadette Allamel not only to develop their anthropological knowledge but to pursue specific studies of the culture and arts of the Shipibo people of the Peruvian Amazon. One culmination of these studies is the exhibition Echoes of the Rainforest: The Visual Arts of the Shipibo Indians. The exhibition opened to the public today (March 19, 2019) and will be on view at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures through December 22, 2019. The exhibition features ceramics, textiles and other remarkable objects and works of art reflective of Shipibo culture, history, and aesthetics. These works are contextualized with ethnographic photographs drawn from Bernadette and Frédéric’s fieldwork and a well-crafted exhibition script. The exhibition and the objects and images that it contains are visually stunning and the exhibition offers visitors a great deal of knowledge and insight.

Echoes of the Rainforest: The Visual Arts of the Shipibo Indians on opening day.

I hope that everyone in Bloomington and Southern Indiana will come out for this exhibition. My quick iPhone images do not do the exhibition justice. It is a knock-out. Come see it and marvel at the work that this group of young museum anthropologists has accomplished.

Special thanks to Frédéric and Bernadette Allame and their wonderful students.