Intersections: World Arts Local Lives.

In September of 2006 the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History opened to the public the first long-term installation dedicated to its permanent collections. Titled "Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives," this 6,300-square-foot exhibition features 250 of the finest examples of the Museum's vast holdings of African, Asian, Pacific, and Native and Latin American works of art. The selection of objects, spanning some 4,000 years to the present, was made according to their outstanding artistic quality, geographical scope, historical breadth, and interpretive richness. This new exhibition will enhance the Fowler Museum as a national destination for viewing and learning about global arts and cultures.

"Intersections" represents a significant step in the Fowler's forty-four year history and an opportunity to strengthen accessibility to its renowned permanent collections. The gallery is designed to be on view for ten or more years, but has significant elements of change built into its conception, ensuring dynamism and relevance over time. It incorporates a thematic and cross-cultural (as opposed to a geographical) approach to exhibiting and thinking about world arts, while simultaneously increasing the visibility of the collections. The new space showcases highly important, yet seldom seen works of art. The exhibition also provides new opportunities for teaching, learning, and audience-building, which depend on past accomplishments in interpretive exhibition development and on technological and scholarly advances in the museum field.

"Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives" explores the roles art plays in creating meaning and defining purpose for people across the globe. We hope visitors take away the message that art has vital connections to people's lives and that artistry is a critical part of an object's efficacy. We want audiences to see that art is never static, that it is now and always has been in a state of creative transformation. The objects in "Intersections" convey the beauty, skill, and artistic accomplishments of diverse cultures. The exhibition themes explore and emphasize aesthetic principles and the role of the artist, while also teaching about contexts of use and meaning. Through interpretive components, the exhibition offers glimpses into the lives and histories that informed the objects, the stories they engendered, and the performances of which they were part. The exhibition title, therefore, is twofold in meaning: Visitors will intersect with a wide range of world arts and cultures, many of them perhaps for the first time, while at the same time learning that art traditions are constantly updated and reinvented in response to intersections--with new forms and ideas, changing circumstances, and other cultures.

The Fowler Museum and the Wellcome Collection

The Museum of Cultural History at UCLA was founded in 1963 to provide a home for the various collections and associated information being brought back to the university by anthropologists and archaeologists doing fieldwork around the world. Chancellor Franklin Murphy, who with great foresight founded the Museum, also negotiated the gift in 1965 of 30,000 objects from the Sir Henry Wellcome Collection in England, assembled early in the twentieth century, which forms the core of our African and Pacific holdings. Today, our art and ethnographic collections total more than 150,000 objects from traditional and contemporary African, Asian, Pacific, and Latin and Native American cultures, as well as parts of eastern Europe and the Middle East. The African collection, with more than 40,000 objects, is among the top twenty African collections worldwide. Other strengths include more than 24,000 Latin American and pre-Columbian objects, and more than 10,000 textiles, with particular strengths in Indonesia and the Philippines. Additionally, we have been the official campus repository for archaeological items, which now number more than 600,000, mostly from California, Mexico, and the Southwest. As steward of this national treasure, the Museum has an important responsibility to share its collections with as wide and varied a visitor population as possible.

The size and scope of this collection has made it enormously important for research. Since our founding, the Museum has become one of the most prolific publishers of scholarship on non-Western art traditions, largely produced in association with major, thematic, nationally touring exhibitions. To date, we have produced 162 exhibitions and 103 publications on specific themes, cultures, or artistic genres around the world and the Fowler is recognized nationally for its ability to present cultural diversity and complex ideas in ways that are accessible to audiences of all backgrounds. Projects have examined the artistic excellence and vitality of both traditional and contemporary expressive forms, and whenever possible they are informed by the contributions and voices of representative scholars, artists, and practitioners.

After thirty years in the basement of a classroom building, the Museum moved in 1992 into a new state-of-the-art facility, with more than 17,000 square feet of exhibition space in three large galleries. At that time, the name was changed to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History based on the lead gift of the Fowler family. Using strengths in the collection as springboards, the Museum continued to develop changing exhibitions on a wide range of topics and cultures, always conveying the artistic merit and creative strength of objects within their broader social and historical contexts.

While the temporary exhibition program (which will continue in full force alongside the new long-term exhibition) has enabled us to investigate subjects in depth and with specificity, it has also meant that the Museum's finest objects are not on view continuously. Furthermore, temporary exhibitions do not allow us to offer a basic orientation into world arts and cultures. "Intersections" will enable us to answer fundamental questions asked by visitors about non-Western arts by demonstrating the role these objects can play as vehicles of learning and windows into cultural worlds. It is a way for us to extend the lessons learned through developing temporary exhibitions to create an equally vibrant, long-term presentation that remains responsive to new ideas and extraordinary acquisitions.

"Intersections" reflects exciting research and writing in the fields of art history, anthropology, and religion on the ways art works in an active sense, and how its forms and aesthetic attributes contribute directly to these processes. Our particular work as museum professionals is to develop strategies to communicate these ideas to a cross-section of audiences using a combination of carefully selected objects and equally carefully considered interpretive devices. The exhibition has been designed to reveal layers of meaning. Our objectives are to show that objects in the Fowler's collections are examples of the highest aesthetic standards in their respective cultures and products of consummate artistic skill and vision, and to illustrate how these objects function in a variety of specific and culturally prescribed ways.

The exhibition elaborates these ideas though four broad thematic sections. In the first, titled "Art and Action," the visitor encounters a selection of outstanding objects chosen to offer insights into intersections between artistry and capacity, and between works of art and their makers. Three subsequent sections then examine some of the principal ways these objects intersect with peoples' lives. "Art and Knowledge" allows us to explore certain objects' ability to impart cultural, historical, and cosmological knowledge, and/or encode memory and express identity. "Art and Power" encompasses the many ways that objects bestow prestige upon their owners, negotiate gender, or act to harness and/or summon the powers of the natural and spirit worlds. Finally, "Art and Transformation" addresses the tangible ways that objects may effect change and assist with life's challenges and transitions, including the passage through death and rebirth. It is important to note that these themes are not mutually exclusive; often objects perform multiple roles. As such, we foreground the role best exemplified by the object itself through, for example, its iconography and form, and by supporting interpretive materials.

The Project's History

In early 2002, Fowler Director Marla C. Berns made the creation of a long-term collections-based exhibition one of the priorities for the Fowler's strategic plan, and a creative team of core staff members began convening to lay the philosophical and practical framework for the project. Led by Deputy Director and Chief Curator Polly Nooter Roberts, the team included Curator of Asian and Pacific Collections Roy Hamilton; Director of Exhibitions David Mayo; and Director of Education Betsy Quick. During the planning phase we undertook research and evaluation, met with colleagues in the field, visited permanent collection galleries in art museums across the United States and Europe, and assembled advisory committees of local teachers, UCLA faculty, community leaders, and Museum members.

Throughout the twentieth century, the arts of world cultures have been displayed in permanent galleries of American museums in varying ways. Each approach has reflected the biases and prevailing attitudes of the time or the paradigms typically used by particular kinds of museums. In recent years, a number of natural history, anthropology, and art museums have been rethinking and reinstalling their permanent galleries of world arts. During the spring and summer of 2003 the Fowler project team visited the Denver Art Museum, the Heard Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Walker Art Center, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Museum, the Louvre, the Musee du Quai Branly (which was still in planning stages), and the Musee Guimet, among others. These visits helped us explore such tangible elements as design formats, casework, lighting, and didactics, as well as conceptual issues such as thematic versus geographic organization, paradigms for cross-cultural exploration, and the use of first voices.

As we began to identify our objectives, it was clear that the exhibition would have to feature art from all the key global areas Fowler collections encompass. We wanted to highlight our best and most important objects, whether their virtue lay in age and provenance or aesthetic quality and rarity. But we wanted neither a "treasures" show nor an exhibition that presented objects based on geography. Collectively, we agreed that a thematic approach would offer our visitors the richest experience of our collections and one that allowed for intersections between forms and ideas.

Also during 2003, in-house and consulting curators studied the thousands of objects in our storage rooms to begin identifying objects to be included in the exhibition. To augment existing staff expertise, Dr. Virginia Fields, Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at LACMA, was hired to assist with the selection of objects from pre-Columbian, colonial, and postcolonial Mesoamerica. The team drew on the specialized expertise of former directors Christopher B. Donnan (Andean ceramics) and Doran H. Ross (Africa and Oceania) in addition to many of the project's other consultants and subject experts.

Exhibition Strategies

With major support, totaling over a million dollars, from many granting agencies and foundations (including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Getty, Ahmanson, Ralph M. Parsons, and W.L.S. Spencer Foundations) and private patrons, we were able to develop and implement several key interpretive strategies and to completely refurbish our largest gallery for a custom-designed long-term installation.

At the beginning of "Intersections" is a nine-minute introductory video, produced by Peter Kirby, followed by the four major thematic sections designed around a central changing gallery called "Fowler in Focus." The video is a critical presentational strategy and ensures that the exhibition's key concepts are introduced in an immediate, visually stimulating format. It conveys the messages that objects have lives and that people have deep and abiding relationships with objects. It expresses these concepts through a series of vignettes featuring artists, scholars, religious practitioners, and community leaders, all of whom articulate in different but compelling ways the importance of objects in their lives. The video interweaves these accounts with remarkable video footage of performances and shrines, works of art in the exhibition, and music.

Interactive video kiosks in three of the galleries also offer a menu of stories that focus on the contexts of use and meaning behind selected works of art. In "Art and Action," the video kiosk emphasizes the stories of particular artists, such as Magdalene Odundo, a contemporary African ceramist; Sisilia Sii, an Indonesian weaver from the island of Flores; and Felix Lopez, a santos carver from New Mexico, each of whom provides an intimate understanding of the process and the passion behind the creation of particular kinds of works shown in the galleries. In "Art and Knowledge," the three case studies focus on meaning and memory; one study is on the universe of cultural information embedded within Moche ceramics and revealed through archaeological excavations and art historical analysis; another on the transmission of memory and history through the painting of a clan house in Papua New Guinea; and a third on the integral role that katsina figures play in Hopi lives past and present. Finally, in "Art and Power," three videos explore case studies of power and pageantry through a personal account about life at the palace of the Bamum king in Cameroon with its profusion of art forms; an exploration of the vitality of potlatch ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest as articulated by First Nations peoples who continue these traditions today; and finally, the dramatic masquerade spectacles called Barong, in Bali, Indonesia, used to maintain social equilibrium by dispelling misfortune from people's lives. Each of these stories was chosen to complement the extraordinary objects on view in the galleries.

An accompanying free audio guide presents two listening options for visitors. A random-access version focuses on selected objects, with the voices of artists and cultural spokespersons featured prominently alongside those of curators and specialists. A thirty-minute linear tour narrated by the curators walks the visitor through the exhibition, stopping at key section beginnings to provide a conceptual overview followed by a focused discussion of selected objects and case studies. The audio guide is programmed so that listeners may pause, change to another mode, and then continue where they left off.

To avoid becoming static, and also to reflect the Museum's philosophy that culture is always on the move, the Fowler has built elements of change into the exhibition's conception and format. Certain displays within the four main sections will be rotated on an annual basis. For example, in the "Art and Power" gallery we open with the leadership arts of the Cameroon Grassfields, but will change this display in two years to feature Akan royal arts of Ghana-another area of strength in our collections. Textiles will be alternated on a schedule to be determined by curators in consultation with our conservators, depending on their condition and fragility.

At the center of the exhibition is a 900-square-foot space called "Fowler in Focus" that will feature recent acquisitions, selected artistic genres, and engaging thematic topics. The primary purpose of this space, which will be reinstalled three times a year, is to demonstrate the constant development of Fowler collections as well as the interpretations generated by new research. Selected "Fowler in Focus" exhibitions will be accompanied by a small publication as part of a new monograph series that begins in 2006. During 2006-2007, the three presentations will be South Asian oil lamps, Zambian masks, and bast fiber textiles.

The "Intersections" installation has been designed to give the objects space and to encourage aesthetic contemplation and the exploration of associated themes. The choice of saturated, jewel tone wall colors for the four main sections and a white-box gallery for "Fowler in Focus" is intended to make the installation feel fresh and new, and also to move away from earlier stereotypical colors associated with exhibitions of non-Western arts. Wall texts and object labels were written to be lively and informative, yet as brief as possible. Inspired by their use elsewhere, like the Denver Art Museum, we have developed two types of pull-out laminated panels in addition to the regular labels: Added Perspective panels provide detailed information on iconography, methods of use, or particular stories associated with selected objects; and Objects of Encounter--influenced in part by ideas Ruth Phillips had considered for exhibiting "encounters" at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia--are intended to draw visitors' attention to how forms or motifs reveal dynamic intercultural or historical interactions and encounters. Kept in slots in the case structure where objects are installed, visitors can choose to avail themselves of the information or not.

The making of "Intersections" also has fostered collaborations with various native communities whose cultural legacy we now preserve and protect. For the potlatch video, we partnered with the U'mista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, Canada, which houses and exhibits an important repository of repatriated potlatch material as well as archival materials on the Kwakwaka'wakw (a.k.a. Kwakiutl). Instead of simply securing the rights to use their film footage, our Curator of Archaeology Wendy Teeter and Media Consultant Agnes Stauber worked with and interviewed several elder and younger community members about what potlatch is and what it means in their lives. For the Hopi video, we worked with community members and representatives of Hopi cultural preservation, most notably Emory Sekaquaptewa, to develop the storyline and to deepen our understanding of the Hopi works in our collection. The direct participation of these individuals has been essential to the project. It demonstrates the very rich outcomes that are possible when museums and communities intersect and work together.

The Exhibition

Five outstanding works of art greet the visitor upon entering the exhibition, each depicting the human face: an elegant animal-skin-covered headpiece with a woman's face and a flamboyant, gravity-defying coiffure from the Efut of southeastern Nigeria (19th century; see cover image); a remarkably realistic ceramic Moche portrait vessel from Peru (100-700 C.E.; Fig. 2); a rare and masterfully carved and painted wooden face of a shaman by the Tsimshian peoples of British Columbia (19th century; Fig. 3); an exquisite Chinese hand puppet representing a scholar (19th-early 20th century); and a boldly rendered Malagan helmet mask worn during festivals in New Ireland (19th-early 20th century). Like artistic expression in all of its diverse and varied forms, these works speak to human concerns and preoccupations, and at the same time convey the particularities of their own cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical systems of thought. The art works presented here are about humanity: people, ancestors, communities, and generations. In addition to a wall panel and an audio stop in the linear tour, these points are reinforced through the introductory video, shown in a screening area with comfortable seating, which visitors pass through before proceeding to subsequent sections.

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Art and Action

The first major gallery that the visitor enters is intended to communicate the exhibition's fundamental message: that objects in the Fowler's collections are products of exceptional artistic achievement at the same time that they play active and essential roles in peoples' lives. Through a selection of objects from around the world, texts and labeling, and a set of audio-guide stops, visitors begin to learn about the interconnectedness of art, artistry, and action.

Six visually arresting examples dominate the center of the gallery to immediately engage the viewer. Some of the objects are world renowned, while others are equally remarkable yet never before exhibited. These works show the exquisite detailing of beadwork, the luster of textiles, and the various possibilities in woodcarving styles and surfaces. Their variation will encourage visitors to question the kinds of roles and impacts these works had within broader social and historical contexts. The works include:

A pair of elaborately carved early to mid-20th century Yoruba doors by the master sculptor Areogun, once a part of a royal household (Fig. 1);

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A contemporary Yoruba beaded crown made by Jose Rodriguez, a Cuban/Puerto Rican artist and practitioner of Yoruba religion (Fig. 4);

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One of a few existing eharo masks from the Elema peoples of New Guinea (late 19th-early 20th century), who customarily destroyed these objects after they were used in festivals (Fig. 5);

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An imposing New Caledonia feather-clad sculpture used by chiefs to embody their ancestral authority--an extremely rare work featuring a spectacular coiffure made of human hair;

One of the world's finest nkisi nkondi, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (18th-19th century)--a nearly life-sized power figure used for swearing oaths in legal cases (Fig. 6); and

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A spectacular silk Balinese train that was attached to the palanquin of the King of Buleleng (North Bali) and carried by a procession of attendants.

Visitors learn about these works through object labels that link the creative process to the ways objects are activated. For example, the label for the Kongo nkisi figure brings the visitor's attention to the many layers of items that have been added to the figure's surface over the course of its lifetime. It bristles with nails, each one pounded into its surface to bear witness to an oath sworn and a trial held. Its assertive gesture and stance serve as a code for action and power, readiness and vigilance. The label also explains that the Kongo peoples describe the power that inheres within the object as nkisi, a spiritual potentiality that can be unleashed each time the sculpture is used. Similarly, through the Yoruba crown, visitors learn about the Yoruba concept of ashe, the authority or power that can reside in objects like this royal emblem. In the audio tour, the artist, Jose Rodriguez, talks about the making of the work and the meaning of the crown's symbolic iconography.

The Yoruba doors, carved with horizontal registers of detailed narrative scenes, reflect Yoruba daily life and ritual. The scenes include symbols of worldliness and cultural intersections such as bicycles, one of the most popular imported modes of transportation in Africa. The label describes how consummate artists such as Areogun, who carved these doors, incorporated new ideas and motifs into their art to further enhance an object's artistry and capacity.

Beauty and Purpose: Art that Works. Moving beyond these six singular objects, the visitor encounters a 22-foot display with smaller objects, all utilitarian in some way but rendered in the most exquisite forms. These works show that even objects of more mundane purposes, such as containers, seats, sleeping pillows, and baby carriers, are enhanced and beautified so as to increase their effectiveness. Most of the objects are arranged in multiple groupings, showing visitors the many variations and innovations possible within a single aesthetic canon or artistic genre. This strategy allows us to share some of the breadth and depth of Fowler Museum collections. The display includes a multicultural array of examples such as:

Japanese baskets of minimalist design made to hold flower arrangements (early to mid-20th century; Fig. 7);

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A grouping of ancient Peruvian vessels, some with complex polychrome design elements and others depicting anthropomorphic and zoomorphic scenes in three dimensions (2nd-15th centuries C.E.);

A variety of finely carved and decorated headrests from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific used as sleeping pillows (10th-19th centuries; Fig. 8);

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Southeast Asian areca nut (betel) cutters and spatulas of elegant form (19th-20th centuries);

Elaborately decorated Nigerian gourds used for domestic life (20th century); and

Domestic furnishings from Africa and its diasporas, such as a richly symbolic Suriname stool, a figurative Mangbetu/Zande trinket box (Fig. 9), a Chokwe seat (Fig. 10), and a beautifully inlaid Swahili chair from Lamu Island off the coast of Kenya (18th-20th centuries).

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An audio-guide stop in the linear tour invites visitors to notice how these objects are embellished and enhanced in ways that elevate everyday activities and imbue them with special significance and value. For example, headrests from Polynesia, China, and Central Africa may be used as pillows for the head, while at the same time being vehicles for communicating with the ancestors through dreams or fulfilling other functions. An object may perform several roles at once and have multiple layers of meaning and significance without any contradiction whatsoever.

The Mangbetu/Zande container, which masterfully combines the shape of a cylindrical box with an anthropomorphic form, is designated as an Object of Encounter, whose pull-out panel explains that figurative images in this region of Africa may have been influenced by the presence and tastes of foreign visitors who were commissioning objects from local artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Art and Knowledge

Visitors now enter a section of works singled out for their ability to encode, protect, transmit, or elicit knowledge. That is, they have meaning and the ability to teach and impart wisdom, not only to their original owners, makers, and users, but also to us--here and now. In this section we invite visitors to think deeply about this seemingly simple concept. They explore how objects can communicate historical knowledge about cultures for which we have no written records; stimulate memory through graphic and written inscriptions and serve as vehicles for oral traditions; instruct, educate, and initiate through performance; convey identity through dress and adornment; and celebrate heritage through reference to ancestors, genealogies, and migrations. Each of these subthemes is explored through both cross-cultural displays (with a selection of varied objects from diverse parts of the world sharing a similar approach to a topic) and those devoted to a single case study.

The visitor first encounters a case containing four Moche fine-line painted ceramic vessels. There are no existing written records from the Moche peoples of the north coast of Peru. Yet a pottery tradition of remarkable beauty, precision, and informational wealth has survived, and the Fowler Museum possesses one of the most significant collections of Moche ceramics, dating from 100-700 C.E. Visitors learn through an audio-guide stop and a video, narrated by Moche archaeologist and UCLA professor Christopher B. Donnan, that the analysis of pottery forms, iconography, contexts, and other data, has allowed art historians and archaeologists to piece together a picture of ancient life among the Moche. The works in this section show visitors that art can be a remarkable window onto the past, and each individual label demonstrates what an object can reveal about a culture's history.

Memory and Cosmology. A large wall case contains a suite of cross-cultural objects that serve to encode and to communicate memory and cosmology. As the linear tour in the audio-guide explains, not only does art assist the outsider looking in upon a culture's past, but also many peoples of Asia, the Americas, and Africa have devised complex visual systems for recording and narrating their own histories, family stories, and other vital cultural information. Some cultures had writing systems, such as the Maya's hieroglyphics, which were merged with art forms to impart vital information. In other cases, systems of graphic inscription such as those found on a Tibetan mandala or a Batak calendrical instrument both were artfully rendered and served to transmit knowledge. Finally, many art works are visual stimuli for oral traditions, such as a virtuoso ntan drum from Ghana (Fig. 11) carved by Osei Bonsu in 1935 and covered with visual motifs that recall proverbs, and a Luba royal bow and arrow holder from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which evoked stories of the culture hero who introduced kingship to the Luba.

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Performing Knowledge. Museums use objects as teaching devices for instructing the public, yet much of the art in the Fowler collections was always intended for this purpose in its earlier contexts. In this section, visitors have the opportunity to compare three case studies from Asia, Africa, and Native North America that offer specific examples of the ways art objects have and continue to serve educational roles. Among these are:

Delicate puppets from Burma (early-mid 20th century) accompanied by a small video screen showing puppet theater in action. The Fowler has one of the largest collections of Asian puppets in the world and selections from its Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese puppets will appear in this space in rotation, representing a remarkably broad range of characters;

Two stunning, yet highly distinctive masks used for initiation in Africa; one from a Mende girl's initiation in Sierra Leone (Fig. 12) and the other from a Yaka boy's initiation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (both 19th century); and

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Early 20th century Hopi katsina dolls (also called tithu) used to teach youth about the complex pantheon of katsinam spirits.

The Object of Encounter in this section is a later twentieth century Hopi katsina--an image that many museum visitors will recognize. Katsinam have become increasingly commodified in recent years, both among Hopi themselves who are experimenting with new forms and ideas, and also among non-Hopi--on the Navajo reservation, in factories in the Philippines, and at the design firm of Hermes Paris. The label for this work includes a quote from Hopi artist Gerry Quotskuyva, who addresses issues of appropriation and reinterpretation by suggesting that different perspectives can ensure the dynamism of Hopi art.

Dress and Identity. The Fowler Museum's textile holdings are among the most important in the United States, and there is no dearth of first-rate examples to show how dress communicates identity in cultures worldwide. Visitors encounter examples from one culture area at a time, but the works in this display will rotate three times yearly. Not only is this necessary for the preservation of the textiles themselves, but it also offers the opportunity to look deeply at more than one specific case.

The first to be featured is an outstanding collection of beautifully woven and ikat-dyed women's coats from multiethnic communities in Uzbekistan. Interpretive text and an audio stop invite visitors to think about the messages we communicate about ourselves in what we choose to wear. Field photographs offer a wider lens for understanding the role of dress in cultural context. Detailed information about styles, designs, and the history of their production are provided through an Added Perspective pullout label. Other textiles to be displayed in the first five years include elegant dress styles from a wide variety of cultures: West Bank and Syrian Arab communities, Guatemalan, Lao-Tai, Zulu (South African), Kutchi (India), Balkan, Kuba (central Africa), Batak (Indonesia), Timorese, Incan, and Plains Indian.

Proclaiming Heritage. In addition to art forms that encode identity, many Fowler objects are intended as conduits for communication of ancestral heritage. Through a work of art the living may continue to communicate with the deceased and also to remember the long lines of ancestry from which one descends. The visitor here encounters one of the most dramatic displays in the exhibition. Twelve carved wooden sculptures of ancestors, including architectural elements and free-standing figures, serve as examples of one of the most important art forms of the Austronesian peoples of the Pacific. Varying in artistic style from the realistic to the highly abstract, these sculptures were prominently displayed in noble lineage houses or in village plazas. There they served to remind the inhabitants of the heritage of their ancestors, who first established the leading clans of the settlement. The figures on display include several masterpieces, such as one of the finest and most prized Nias Island (Indonesia) sculptures known; a massive, boldly abstract doorpost from New Caledonia (Fig. 13); and a pair of elegant ancestor-topped posts from Leti (eastern Indonesia). In the audio-guide, Fowler curator Roy Hamilton explains how sculptures like these, together with sacred place names, kept orally transmitted memory alive. A large-scale map, two large photomurals, and an Added Perspective panel provide details about the history of Austronesian expansion through time.

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Art and Power

The next major section of the exhibition features arts made for purposes of empowerment. Their importance is in large measure associated with their ability to assert political authority, assure control over the environment, negotiate male/female relationships, and express status and prestige. The first work that the visitor encounters in this section is a dramatic and outstanding 19th century flute stopper from the Mundugumor peoples of the East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea (Fig. 14). Such a work of art would have been the prerogative of a men's association, its purpose to guard and protect men's secret knowledge.

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The label introducing this section explains that power is defined in culturally specific ways that reflect the priorities and values of a people. For example, political power is not always indicative of military might or authoritarian leadership. It may reside, rather, in a king's quick wit and oratorical wisdom, or in a ruler's implicit link to the spirit world. Such attributes are often embodied in the detailed iconography of leadership arts or in the rarity and labor-intensiveness of personal prestige articles. Likewise, empowering men and women is not simply a question of bestowing separate rights on each of the sexes, but may involve a kind of theater of negotiation. Art works are able to facilitate and represent these power relationships through their forms and attendant meanings.

Empowering Leaders. The intersections of art and leadership are explored in a striking display of Cameroon Grassfields royal arts. The centerpiece of the case is a massive wooden Bamileke mask that celebrated royal authority and chiefly power--one of the Fowler's most famous objects (Fig. 15). This pre-WWI object, of which only a dozen are known, is a tourde-force of African art. It leads visitors to a rich case study of Cameroon Grassfields arts of leadership that includes monumental masks and figures and beaded regalia from the Bamum, Kom, Babanki, and other kingdoms in which the arts play a central and direct role in governance and authority. The pieces in this section are coupled with spectacular and informative field photographs that show visitors how the objects looked during performances and royal processions. The related video features recent footage from the research of Christraud Geary and is narrated in first person by Usmanou Nsangou.

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Negotiating Gender. This section consists of ten superior works that demonstrate how art can define male and female roles in society. Fowler collections hold numerous objects that embody concepts about gender and that enable men and women to express their differences and interdependencies. They include:

A Toba Batak knife adorned with a superb miniature depiction of a husband and wife. Once an object of ceremonial exchange at a marriage, its iconography depicts the complementarity of the sexes (late 19th-early 20th century; Fig. 16); and

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Baule nature spirit figures (Fig. 17) and spirit spouse figures from Cote d'Ivoire that embody the spirit of the opposite sex, which every member of the society is thought to have in the otherworld. An Object of Encounter text panel discusses how the 20th century Baule spirit spouse couple donning Western dress and bright industrial paint demonstrates the ongoing vitality of this tradition.

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Other objects reinforce the power of one gender or the other:

An outstanding 19th century Yoruba Gelede mask from Nigeria, attributed to Labintan, that was made and worn by men to honor and placate the powers of "our mothers" (late 19th-early 20th century; Fig. 18);

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A compelling Egungtm headdress, attributed to Adugbologe, depicting a male hunter, reinforcing the ethos and power of hunting as a man's profession and also as a conduit to great reserves of power (made prior to 1922; Fig. 19);

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A seldom exhibited yet renowned work of Mbole art from the Wellcome collection depicting a male figure with a white, heart shaped face, in a position of suspension in reference to the requirement of male initiates never to divulge the secrets of the association to women (19th century; Fig. 20); and

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An 18th-19th century Luba royal figure from the Democratic Republic of the Congo once owned by a male ruler. It depicts a female figure to express the importance of women in traditional Luba politics and to attract the spirits through its aesthetic perfection (Fig. 21).

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Harnessing Spirits. Animal forms are pervasive in the arts of many of the cultures the Fowler Museum represents, but this section looks specifically at those made to control and harness the powers of spirits in nature. An outstanding group of works with fantastic forms and composite imagery make manifest the forces of the natural world and the diverse animals that populate it. Such animals sometimes pose dangers, but they can also be sources of food, shelter, trade, and vehicles for spirit beings. In other cases, they may serve as metaphors for human behavior, or they may have properties that are efficacious for healing and/or other forms of protection and empowerment. This section includes:

A muscular Borneo hornbill figure that tests the boundaries of the supernatural. One of the Fowler's most famous pieces, it is recognized as one of the finest works of carving from Borneo extant today (early 20th century; Fig. 22);

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Animal crest masks from the Fowler's remarkable Pacific Northwest Coast collection, including a polychrome Nisga'a frontlet depicting a white owl through a combination of materials including wood, walrus whiskers, and leather (19th century; Fig. 23); and

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A superb African mask from the Igbo people of Nigeria by Ezeki Ngwo made from 1940-50, whose accumulation of elements from the natural world conveys the unleashed potentiality of the animal forms it references (Fig. 24).

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Visitors can explore concepts of activation or power that inhere within these zoomorphic objects. Interpretive labels reinforce the message that each of these artistic forms has the ability to harness spiritual power and to help people control the forces of nature.

Status and Prestige. Individual empowerment may be expressed through articles of prestige and status such as emblems, insignia, and jewelry; objects made from rare and precious materials; labor-intensive works of art; and things of beauty, precision, elegance, and grace. Such articles occur in almost every culture worldwide, and their role is often to extend the person physically and metaphorically. Whether through the wearing of dramatic and aggrandizing garments or through the possession of worldly items, a person becomes more than him- or herself. Such objects are displayed to emphasize their exquisite form and detail. A wall text describes the themes of this section, and the audio-guide invites visitors to consider shared methods for expressing status and prestige and also to notice what makes each cultural example aesthetically distinctive.

Visitors first view a small group of works in materials including gold, jade, ivory, silk, feathers, shell, brass, and bronze. Among them are:

A treasury of 17th-century Akan gold in the form of a spectacular necklace and bracelet, as well as a gold-covered linguist staff (c. 1930; Fig. 25);

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A Kuba embroidered skirt of complex geometric patterning from Central Africa that was used to denote royal status (19th century);

An ancient Olmec maskette and a Guerrero figurine from Central Mexico, both carved from jade (Pre-Classic, 1200 to 300 B.C.E.);

Two tiny ivory pendants from the Luba and Pende of Central Africa that served as precious personal articles of value and beauty (18th-20th centuries; Fig. 26); and

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Two brass castings from the Benin kingdom of Nigeria (18th-19th century; Fig. 27), stunning examples of the artistry and complexity of Benin iconography, that demonstrate the conceptual intersections between power and art.

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A significant object in this section on prestige items (and also an Object of Encounter) is an intricately carved ivory tusk from the Loango coast of central Africa (c. 1850) representing an early example of tourist art in Africa. Only about 600 of these carvings were produced during the latter half of the nineteenth century by a prestigious carving guild, mostly as souvenirs commissioned by European trading companies; a few were presented as gifts from African to European royalty to signify worldliness and wealth. Their iconography is a mixture of African and European imagery, with contemporary European images seen through the eyes of Congolese artists. Visitors are guided to consider the tusk's distinctive profile of Queen Victoria.

Art and Transformation

While many works serve to maintain the status quo and/or to ensure social harmony, there are some objects whose purpose is specifically to cope with challenges and change. The fourth and final major section of the exhibition features works that are made to assist with life's essential transitions and transformations. Objects may be used for spiritual intervention, healing, and other forms of problem solving. They may be used to assist the passage through death. Or they may reflect the dynamic nature of changing artistic traditions.

Arts for Spiritual Intervention. Cultures around the world have specific ways of coping with difficulties, misfortunes, and challenges. For some peoples, objects are made as vessels or abodes for spirits and other agents of change. By constructing an object in a particular way, the object attracts the spirit to it, and thereby can impact a person's or community's life. A striking array of figures used for spiritual intervention welcomes the visitor into the gallery. Central African power figures from the Songye, Yombe, Bembe, and Kongo are well known for their bold forms, varied iconography of gesture, and accumulative aesthetic that implies process and continual visual transformation (Figs. 28 and 29). A random-access audio stop features celebrated art historian Robert Farris Thompson, who discusses the potent meanings and capacities underlying gesture and iconography in Kongo figures.

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Also in the section is a group of finely painted Japanese ema--wooden votive tablets used to secure divine intercession--and Mexican retablos--often found on home altars as focal points of devotional practice. In both cases, these works are objects of divine mediation and bridges to transformation. Three figures from mainstream world religions are also featured in this gallery: a large Burmese Buddha; a Philippine colonial santo figure depicting St. Jacinto; and a carved stone Hindu temple sculpture from India representing a yogini. In contrast to the intimate quality of the emas, retablos, and power figures, which can be commissioned by individuals, these objects of devotion belonged to temples and churches and were communally owned and publicly viewed.

Memorials and Transcendence. Myriad art forms in the Fowler's holdings were made to cope with human mortality and the inevitability of death. The visitor first encounters five examples of funerary objects from West Mexico, which emphasize the vital role of the arts in the last phases of life and on the spirit's journey to the hereafter. These intriguing objects, which were made and used in the states of Nayarit, Colima, and Jalisco, are juxtaposed with a far more contemporary tradition of memorialization of the dead in Mexico: a tree of death dedicated to the families of the recent female murder victims known as the Women of Juarez. This dramatic and powerful sculpture was made for a Day of the Dead altar in 2003 by Veronica Castillo Hernandez and has helped families to cope with the violent loss of their loved ones.

Some objects in this section are protectors of the relics of the deceased, such as the dynamic eighteenth-nineteenth century works by Kota and Ndzebi/Sango artists of Gabon in West-Central Africa (Fig. 30). In an adjacent case, an assemblage of seven spectacular carved and painted figures represent the Malagan funerary tradition of New Ireland (Papua New Guinea; Fig. 31). The figures are grouped in a tableau to suggest the manner in which they would once have been displayed for the most important post-burial rites of this Melanesian society. Historic photographs provide further context to assist visitors in exploring the transformative power of these figures, which would have been left to decay in the tropical climate of the island. An Added Perspective label details New Ireland concepts of memory and death and how a person is memorialized through the recreation of the artistic motifs he invented during his lifetime.

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Tradition as Innovation. Just as most funerary arts are associated with rebirth and renewal, so are many of the arts of these cultures in constant states of reformulation. Many Fowler holdings reflect this dynamic aspect of art and visual culture and the linking of the past to the present. Some art forms of the contemporary moment may express resistance movements, social commentary, and/or modern urban life. The closing works attest to cultures and communities in transition, and the vital role of the arts to express historical transformations.

For example, one work by South African artist Masaego Johannes Segogela, titled Death of Apartheid, is a powerful and poignant commentary on the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Through a grouping of carved and painted wood figures at a funeral, loss is transformed into hope, and grief leads to new beginnings. Another work in this room is an ensemble of truly dramatic papier-mache figures made by the renowned Linares family of Mexico depicting lively skeletons and their steeds (Fig. 32). This installation, called La Calavera Don Quijote, made in 1980, expresses the entwined and interdependent nature of life and death, while also commenting on political reform and transformation. The audio-guide stop features representatives of the Linares family speaking about their art and its relationships to changing traditions in Mexico and in Chicano communities of America, and a small video screen shows various stages of the the artists's creation of the figures.

An elegant ceramic vessel by the Kenya-born, England-based artist Magdalene Odundo beautifully illustrates the way a centuries-old process of African hand-building can be transformed to a new set of uses and meanings through modern technology (Fig. 33). Odundo blends tradition with innovation and has created ceramic vessels that transcend the functional to become aesthetic gestures laden with associations and references. An Object of Encounter panel addresses the use of technology in her invention of new forms.

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On the final wall leading out of the exhibition hangs a highly dramatic large-scale painting by contemporary Haitian-American artist Edouard Duval-Carrie, whose multimedia works address the active involvement of Vodou deities in the lives of Haitians. His paintings are represented in many major museum collections in the US and abroad. This display will rotate annually, always representing a major contemporary work by an artist with links to Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, or Native North America.

The exhibition thus concludes with the visual message that art is active, on the move, and working in the present. While many objects in the Fowler collections emanate from deeply rooted, longstanding traditions, they have rarely been static. Rather, their forms have been constantly updated and reinvented to meet changing social circumstances, to accommodate new media and technologies, and to reflect the dynamism of art and culture around the world.

In conclusion, what will "Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives" mean for the Fowler Museum and its long-range goals and objectives? Internally, it will ground our exhibition program with a dynamic orientation to our collections and mission, while leaving us more time to develop new temporary projects. The small, rotating "Fowler in Focus" gallery at the center of "Intersections" can become a laboratory for experimentation, spontaneity, and collaboration. This new exhibition will have many overlapping outreach possibilities: for general audiences, it can help put the Fowler more firmly on the map as the premiere southern California venue for non-Western arts. For collectors and donors, we can demonstrate that we have made a strong commitment to showing our collections, some of which they have given us. For faculty at UCLA, it can provide a predictable resource for integration into course curricula, and for K-12 teachers incorporation into classroom activities and programs of repeat visitation. And, it can help strengthen our identity as a museum that presents powerful global artistic traditions and insists on linking them to local lives. To this end, we have changed our name to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, dropping the "cultural history" designation, a term that has long confused our visitors, linked us with anthropology museums, excluded us from the ranks of art museums and, essentially, distracted from the fundamental work we have always done to underscore the inextricability of world arts and cultures.

"Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives" lets us close the gap between art and ethnography as well as between the classical and the contemporary. Bringing objects and ideas into cross-cultural intersection promises to be provocative and illuminating. Drawing on the metaphor of the vast streetscape of Los Angeles, intersections can be crossroads for collisions or convergences of communities, traditions, and visual expression.

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