Wednesday April 7th:
Eric Kjellgren.
A Third of the World in Three Rooms:
Redesigning the Oceanic Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Eric Kjellgren is the Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. talks about his work in redesigning and reinstalling the Metropolitan’s permanent galleries for Oceanic Art in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. The Oceanic Galleries opened to the public in November 2007 and display some of the finest Oceanic Arts in a wonderful setting.

Date: Wednesday, April the 7th
Venue: The Australian Museum 6.30 pm

Oceanic Art in Brisbane

Members annoucement of a non-OAS related Oceanic Art Exhibition.
Double Up: Pasifika Treasure in The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum.
February 10th - 9th of April 2010.

Future events:

October 2010 the fourth OAS forum will be held at the South Australian Museum.
Details forthcoming.

Previous events:

Wednesday February 10: The Oceanic Art collection of Alex Philips, its formation, dispersal and other tales.

This image of a superb array of Massim artifacts was originally a 1998 advertising image in Tribal magazine for the Commercial Oceanic Art Gallery Alex Philips owned during the late 1990s. Melbourne based Alex Philips is something of a legend in Australian tribal art circles and widely known as a commercial dealer and collector with a rampant passion for Oceanic Art.

In the 1980s and 90s, his presence at tribal auctions created a buzz in the room as he rapidly built a reputation for obtaining the pieces he really wanted at almost any cost.

In the late 1990s, he unexpectedly reversed this flow of energy and began to sell off his collection, selling pieces of museum quality to many collectors including museums. Recently, he has begun to collect again, determined to build up a collection to rival his original one, and he is already making a fresh impact on the auction scene.

Alex, who bought his first tribal shield at a garage sale while still at school and actively bought and sold at Melbourne’s famous Camberwell Market as a teenager, will review the highlights of his collecting life in a conversational format with OAS President Crispin Howarth. Photographs of many key pieces originally from the Alex Philips Collection will be presented and we will share the stories of these superb artworks and trace their journeys from the Philips Collection to major museums and galleries and important private collections. (Not all of these impressive pieces were purchased for high prices at Sotheby’s. Many were picked up for a song at street markets and on eBay and later sold for more than 10 times their purchase price).

This is going to be a fascinating evening, exploring a great collection and the personal experiences of the collector who put it together

The last OAS event of 2009: Adrienne Kaeppler talks on the Captain James Cook exhibition.

Lecture, AGM and Christmas Lunch, Saturday Nov. 21st National Art School, Forbes St Darlinghurst and La Mint Restaurant, 62 Riley St, Darlinghurst.

OAS is privileged to have Adrienne Kaeppler , Curator of Oceanic Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, and international authority on Cooks’ voyages and the artefacts collected on them as our final guest speaker for 2009.
Cook and his ship’s officers, artists, scientists and crew collected literally thousands of scientific specimens and artefacts on his three Pacific voyages and many of these were presented to royalty or eagerly acquired by museums and private collectors. At that time, their value lay in their rarity and curiosity as objects from an unknown world. Today, we attach far more importance to the fact that these collections were the earliest made in several Pacific islands and provide the baseline for pre-contact art from these societies.
Dr Kaeppler is Senior Curator of the exhibition “James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific”, which opened in Bonn, Germany in August this year. It is the most comprehensive assemblage of Cook-collected artefacts ever displayed and draws heavily on the collections of the University of Göttingen, the Ethnographic Museum of Vienna and the Berne Historical Museum, with supplementary material drawn form the world’s museums including the British Museum, the Cambridge Museum of Anthropology, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and our own Australian Museum, among others.