Exhibition: The Shields of Melanesia at The Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival Sydney College of the Arts

Exhibition: The Shields of Melanesia at The Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival Sydney College of the Arts

This superb exhibition of Melanesian Shields was sponsored by The Oceanic Art Society Sydney & curated by Geoff Carey.

The exhibition showed New Guinea Shields in a way never seen before in Australia at the Sydney College of the Arts who gave use of its large exhibition spaces to allow this exhibition to be part of The Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival showcasing Pacific Islands Art & Culture.

The exhibition was supposed to be in conjunction with a publication of a book by the same name The Shields of Melanesia that was printed five years later in 2005.

The Shields of Melanesia Edited by Harry Beran and Dr Barry Craig

This is the first comprehensive compilation of the war shields of Melanesia. The volume illustrates more than one hundred types of shields from all cultural areas of Melanesia that used such objects. Approximately eighty percent of the shields illustrated in the book have never appeared in print.

The editors describe why the use of fighting shields in the South Pacific was confined to Melanesia. The typology of war shields used in the book is based on an exhaustive survey of the literature, on the field experience of the authors, and on a survey of the collections of the major Australian museums.

Twenty-Four of the shields shown in photos in this book belong to the Todd Barlin Collection of New Guinea Art 

Todd Barlin Wrote three sections of this book

3.1 Shields from the North Coast of Western New Guinea: Pages 28- 32

5.1 The Shields of the Highlands of Western New Guinea : Pages 112- 1117

6.1 Shields from the Southern Lowlands of Western New Guinea: Pages 155-165

I first went to Papua New Guinea in 1985 for an adventure & what I found was that I really enjoyed being with the people of New Guinea, over the next 38 years I spent extensive time spent collecting and documenting traditional art & ceremonies in remote areas of Papua New Guinea & West Papua, The Solomon Islands & Vanuatu & the other Pacific Islands countries. During these travels, I made major collections of New Guinea & Oceanic Art for major Museums and Public Art Galleries

I was honoured by being in the prestigious Louvre Museum Magazine for the collections I made for The Museum of African & Oceanic Art Paris in1996 (now the Musee Quai Branly) for the exhibition “Asmat et Mimika d’ Irian Jaya April 1996 At THE MUSEE NATIONAL des ARTS D’AFRIQUE et d’ OCEANIE, Paris

See all of the links & photos in my new EXHIBITIONS GALLERY and there is the link to the article in the prestigious Louvre Magazine 1996

I have artwork for Museums & Art Galleries but also for collectors at every stage of their collecting. I want to encourage people to explore the fine art of New Guinea & West Papua and the Pacific Islands and to be able to see and touch the artworks in a relaxed and friendly manner in my Sydney Gallery.  I would like to invite you to visit my gallery and see the artworks in person and also look at my website www.oceanicartsaustralia.com  where there are many Galleries & Sub Galleries to explore.

My Gallery of nearly 40 years is the last physical gallery in Sydney that specialises in New Guinea & Oceanic Art. Sydney is just a couple hours’ flight to New Guinea & the Pacific Islands where all of these amazing artworks came from, Australia’s closest neighbours.