The visual arts of Oceania tell a wealth of dynamic stories about origins, ancestral power, performance, and initiation. This publication explores the deeply rooted connections between Austronesian-speaking peoples, whose ancestral homelands span Island Southeast Asia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the island archipelagoes of the northern and eastern Pacific. Unlike previous books, it foregrounds Indigenous perspectives, alongside multidisciplinary research in art history, ethnography, and archaeology, to provide an intimate look at Oceania, its art, and its culture. Stunning new photography highlights more than 130 magnificent objects, ranging from elaborately carved ancestral figures in ceremonial houses, towering slit drums, and dazzling turtle-shell masks to polished whale ivory breastplates. Underscoring the powerful interplay between the ocean and its islands, and the ongoing connection with spiritual and ancestral realms, Oceania: The Shape of Time presents an art-focused approach to life and culture while guiding readers through the artistic achievements of Islanders across millennia.

Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia focuses on an array of artistic creations that illuminate how Polynesians traditionally understood their relationship with the divine as active, dynamic, and manifested in the plants, feathers, and fibers of the islands they inhabited. Featuring some thirty exceptional works of Polynesian art that date from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, Atea examines celebrated examples of figural sculpture in wood and whale ivory; superbly executed feather headdresses and cloaks; and visually compelling fiber works, such as painted barkcloths and a small-scale spirit house, or temple. The author’s compelling essay represents a new phase in scholarship that looks to recover the early ritual landscape of Polynesia by examining the material nature of the art itself.

From the dense rain forests of New Guinea to the spice-rich islands of Indonesia, the tropical archipelagos of Polynesia and Micronesia, and the deserts of Australia, Oceania encompasses hundreds of distinct artistic traditions with an extensive variety of objects and mediums. Formidable, fascinating and even fearsome, they range in size from intricate jewelry to colossal sculptures and musical instruments. In addition to serving numerous practical and decorative purposes, many Oceanic objects were invested with religious or social symbolic significance and often have been used in enthralling ceremonies. The imagery of these remarkable works—ranging from ancestors, gods, and spirits to animals and inter-species composites—has had a direct impact on modern artists, including Paul Gauguin and the Surrealists. An invaluable resource for art-historical study, this third volume in the How to Read series is an important gateway to wider appreciation of Oceanic heritage and visual culture.

This Bulletin and the exhibition it accompanies, "The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: In Pursuit of the Best in Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas," reflect on an extraordinary act of philanthropy that was also a catalyst for momentous change in the art world. In establishing the Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) in 1956—the precursor to what is today the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA) at the Metropolitan Museum—Nelson Rockefeller was a true pioneer, assembling what remains the greatest collection of fine art from these disparate fields. Perhaps even more important than this singular achievement, however, was Rockefeller's long campaign to place his collection at the Metropolitan Museum as a gift to the city and to the world, which he finally achieved in 1969 after nearly forty years of effort. Rockefeller's gift carried the unequivocal message that artists from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas are equal in every respect to those of their peers across the globe and throughout history. Yet until that time there was, famously, skepticism in the Western art world on this point as well as resistance from earlier generations of Metropolitan directors in viewing non-Western art as part of the institution's mission. Relying on his formidable powers of persuasion, Rockefeller eventually brokered an agreement to transfer the collections, staff, and library of the of the MPA to the Metropolitan, an astounding triumph that fundamentally changed the character of the museum, making the collections truly encyclopedic.

Oceania, which includes the islands of the central and South Pacific, covers one third of the earth, an area larger than that of all the continents combined. From the dense rain forests of New Guinea to the spice-rich islands of Indonesia, the tropical archipelagos of Polynesia and Micronesia, and the deserts of Australia, Oceania's peoples have developed hundreds of distinct artistic traditions that encompass an astonishing variety of forms and media. The remarkable imagery of Oceanic art has had a direct influence on many of the most important artists of the Western canon, from Paul Gauguin to the German Expressionists and the Surrealists, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the world's premier collections of art from this region. Published in celebration of the opening of the Metropolitan's newly reinstalled galleries for the arts of Oceania, this generously illustrated volume, the first to survey the breadth of the Museum's collection, provides an introduction to the region's rich artistic heritage through more than two hundred masterworks. An overview of Oceanic art and a history of the Metropolitan's collection are followed by informative introductory essays on the major cultural regions of the Pacific. Detailed discussions of the individual objects place these outstanding Oceanic works inn their historical and cultural contexts. Highlights include selections from the Museum's holdings of sculpture from Polynesia and the Sepik region of New Guinea, religious images from Island Melanesia, and Island Southeast Asian textiles. A glossary and selected bibliography conclude this comprehensive volume.

Known for the elegance and complexity of their decorative art, Marquesan artists were described by Paul Gauguin as possessing "an unheard of sense of decoration" in all they created. The extraordinary ways in which Marquesans adorned their world are reflected in virtually every type of object they made and used—from sacred figures of gods and ancestors to items that were purely functional. Long admired by artists, writers, and scholars, the art and culture of the Marquesas Islands have until recently been unfamiliar to larger audiences. However, the artists of the Marquesas archipelago were among the most accomplished in the Pacific. Their work was fashioned from a diversity of materials in forms ranging from delicate ivory ornaments and luxuriant featherwork to imposing figural sculpture in wood and stone. The human body was also an important focus for artistic expression. Adorned with finely crafted ornaments, elaborate coiffures, and intricate tattoos that sometimes covered the entire body, Marquesans themselves became living art forms. The vivid imagery of Marquesan art is testament to the myriad beings and creatures who inhabited the Marquesan universe—gods, ancestors, humans, lizards, turtles, fish—and to the islands' complex social and political organization. These art forms are explored in the present volume, published in conjunction with the exhibition "Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In their catalogue essays, Eric Kjellgren, the Metropolitan's Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator of Oceanic Art, and Carol S. Ivory, Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Washington State University, place the artistic traditions of the Marquesas within their cultural and historical context, giving insights into their distinctive visual imagery and their enduring influence on Western art and literature.