FOWLER MUSEUM, UCLA: Intersections

Intersections: World Arts/Local Lives. Fowler Museum of Cultural Arts.

One of my favorite museums in Los Angeles is the Fowler Museum of Cultural Arts, located on the UCLA campus just north of the Janss Steps. Housing more then 120,000 art and ethnographic objects and 600,000 archaeological objects it is a treasure house of ancient, traditional, and contemporary cultures of Africa, Native and Latin America, and Asia and the Pacific. It is also a space for a wide variety of wonderful temporary exhibits.

Cloth constructed from recycled metal tabs, from Africa. Intersections exhibit.

Inside the museum, surrounding a garden/atrium, are four galleries. Two are for temporary exhibits. In one of the other galleries is the permanent installation of the silver collection of the Fowler Family (after whom the museum is named.) Among my favorites in this room is the set of Apostle spoons and a painting depicting a royal banquet at which silver dishes like those in the collection were used. This blog post is devoted to a brief overview of some of the exhibits in the main gallery, Intersections, a sampling of objects from the Fowler collection..

Masks.

Intersections: World Arts/Local Lives, first opened to the public in 2006 and since then has showcased objects that inspire conversation and reflection. 

Wooden carvings.

The exhibits in the gallery explore how arts from Africa, Asia and the Pacific and the Americas conceptually intersect with each other. Major sections of the exhibition consider how these arts served as vehicles of action, knowledge, power and transformation.                                                      

Memories and Transcendence: Tree of Life and other objects.

An exceptional collection of more than 900 Mexican works was donated in 1997 by the Daniel Family and includes a magnificent ceramic Trees of Life, Day of the Dead figurines, and masks from Metepec, Oaxaca, Michoacan, Jalisco, Puebla, and Guanajuato.

Spirit's Walk, painting on bark from East Arnhem Land, Australia

Mexican Day of the Dead figures.

A small room within Intersections is for temporary exhibits. (See my earlier post on Armenian Lace.)

In addition to the two galleries for temporary exhibits, an exhibition space for photographs is on the walls of the hallway surrounding the atrium of the museum. (The most recent exhibit there was Remain in Light: Visions of Home and the Diaspora , striking black and white photos, often with dramatic skies, depicting contemporary life in Armenia.) I make regular trips to the Fowler as new exhibits are mounted, but I always return to the Intersections gallery. It is the heart of the museum.

PS And the Fowler Museum gift shop is a perfect place to find gifts for the holidays--or any other time of year!