Page spread showing a naked white female figure by the tree and grass on the left page, a black female figure wearing animal print tights and high heels squatting by the tree on the right page.ALT
Photograph of close-up brunch with thorns on the paper with pen and ink drawing.ALT
Book cover image featuring colorful snake-like shapes against pale-blue backgroundALT

“… I always think that there’s something about trees that feels like they’re the original gallery space, the original place of worship and awe—where we brought our meager and modest human creations so that we could think about divine and unknowable things.”

- Wangechi Mutu in conversation with Trevor Schoonmaker, 2012

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-American artist who is based in both Nairobi and New York. Born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1972, Mutu works across a wide range of media including video, installation, collage, and sculpture. Her work is centered around hybrid and composite female figures that are part human, animal, plant, machine, monster, and land. She often talks about the importance of her roots in Kenya and how Kenyan history was not taught in Kenya while she was growing up. Instead, Kenyan children were taught British history, the colonizer’s history. In her work, Mutu investigates broad issues ranging from gender, race, colonialism, war, rituals, environmental transformation, displacement, hunger, consumption, and in particular, the exoticization of the black female body.

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A young man in black clothing looking at the opened accordion style portfolio.ALT
Photo of the opened accordion style portfolio on the countertop.ALT
Detail showing some portraits depicting the Ainu elders.ALT
Photo of the first two pages with texts in kanji, Chinese characters.ALT

The Ainu people are an indigenous ethnic group residing in the northern parts of the Japanese archipelago, including what is today known as Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu. Their ancestors date back to the Paleolithic (35,000 – 13,500 BCE) and Jomon periods (13,500 – 400 BCE).

This accordion style album is a copy of Ishūretsuzō (夷酋列像), also known as A Series of Paintings of Ainu Chieftains. It is a series of twelve painted portraits of Ainu elders who helped suppress the Menashi–Kunashiri rebellion in 1789 by siding with the Wajin (ethnic Japanese people, also called Yamato people). The original portraits were completed in 1790 by the Japanese artist Kakizaki Hakyō (1764–1826) and was received by the imperial court in Kyoto in 1791. The album includes a portrait of an elderly woman named Chikiriashikai, the mother of the chieftain Ikotoi, also pictured in the album.

Tan Yi-Ern Samuel, Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, is looking at this album for his paper in Professor Yukio Lippit’s seminar on East Asian Portraiture, taught with curator of Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg. Today, we opened the album to look at it in its standing accordion style. The clothing worn and other accoutrements including animal fur depicted in the portraits show the connections between the Ainu, the Wajin, China, and Russia during that time.

The Ainu people are one of the few ethnic minorities native to the Japanese islands. They have been subjected to forced assimilation and colonization by the Japanese since at least the 18th century or earlier. Their ancestors, referred to as Emishi, were pushed to the northern islands by Wajin since the 9th century. The portraits of Ainu elders in this album reveal how they might have been fashioned in the imagination of the Wajin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Nine resin cast of toilets and an actual toilet placed randomly on the floorALT
A urinal with a hole in the middleALT

We heard that November 19th was World Toilet Day, and we thought of “The Old In Out” (1998), an installation of cast resin toilet bowls created by a British artist Sarah Lucas (b. 1962).

Toilets are a recurring theme for Lucas. They often function as reminders of mortality and self-destructive urges in her work. Toilet bowls act as vessels to be filled, and at the same time, they stand in as a body.

And of course, there’s “Fountain” by Duchamp!

Sarah Lucas : exhibitions and catalogue raisonné, 1989-2005
Lucas, Sarah, 1962-
London : Tate, 2005.
HOLLIS number: 990100016970203941

Fountain [original work photographed by Stieglitz]
Duchamp, Marcel, 1887-1968, French [artist]
Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946, American [photographer]
French
1917, lost
HOLLIS number: olvwork53524

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A group of tarot cards on the table.ALT

Happy Native American Heritage Month!

This is set is one of the tarot and oracle cards we featured in our joint event titled, “The Art & Visual Culture of Those Who Seek: Tarot and Divination Collections from Tozzer Library and the Fine Arts Library” which was held on October 29th. This Indigenous oracle deck is a part of Tozzer’s collections.

We greatly enjoyed the tarot and oracle decks added to Tozzer’s Indigenous Knowledge Collection!

Ancient traditions, ancestral guidance, healing rituals, moon phases, animal spirits, and plant allies come alive in this colorfully illustrated oracle deck and guidebook from Indigenous Medicine Woman and author of “You are the medicine,” Asha Frost.

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image

Happy Birthday to Claude Monet who was born on this day!

Waterlilies
Monet, Claude, 1840-1926, French [artist]
Oil on canvas
90 x 93 cm.
French
1906
Repository: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States
HOLLIS number: olvwork184855

This image is part of FAL’s Digital Images and Slides Collection (DISC), a collection of images digitized from secondary sources for use in teaching and learning. FAL does not own the original artworks represented in this collection, but you can find more information at HOLLIS Images.

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A group of people looking at artwork in the museumALT
A woman looking at a large hanging textile workALT
A portrait of an Indian woman holding a stem of lotus flower.ALT

It turned out to be a perfect day for us to visit the Museum of Fine Arts Boston to see the exhibit, “Flowers of Summer and Fall” from the collections of the Arts of South Asia. Our Nic Roth, Visual Resources Librarian for Islamic Art and Architecture, worked with Laura Weinstein, Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at MFA Boston on this exhibit. We were all mesmerized to see highly detailed works on paper depicting exquisite flowers, fruits, and trees. We learned about lotus, jasmine, and Pride of Barbados, speculated some stories behind them, and just enjoyed immersing ourselves in beauty, which we all appreciated today.

Thanks, Laura and Nic for giving us a tour of the exhibit!

MuseumOfFineArtsBoston IndianArt SouthAsianArt Flowers FlowersOfSummerAndFall Exhibit IslamicArt MFABoston HarvardFineArtsLibrary Fineartslibrary Harvard HarvardLibrary