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!

FOLK ART OF IBEROAMERICA: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Embroidered tablecloth from Mexico

From masks to nativities, hats to tablecloths, musical instruments to carved wooden chests, more than 1200 works of the Great Masters of Iberoamerican Folk Art are currently on exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  Glowing with colors that are a feast for the eyes,  they fill four large rooms. The artists come from all the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of Central and South America plus Spain and Portugal.

In the clay section is this wonderful tree of life candelabra with the pineapple jar behind it.

As a member of the museum, I had a chance to view the exhibit on the day before it opened to the public.  The rooms are organized by the materials of which the objects are made: clay, wood, metal, natural fibers, textiles.  Within each room the objects are clustered in groups, with a touch screen video adjacent to each area with identifying information about each object. I had many favorites, including the giant clay jaguars greeting visitors at the entrance to the exhibit.

Nearly life size clay jaguars

I especially liked this painted Peruvian drum with its lively village scene in the section of musical instruments.

Two Andean condors fly overhead in the scene painted on this drum.

Many of the items, like these Mexican skulls, are associated with the celebration of the Day of the Dead. (You can read more about the Day of the Dead in Ann Stalcup's guest post on this blog 10/27/14.)

Clay skulls

This diorama from Brazil made of painted wood depicts a June fiesta.  The artist is Tarcisio Jose Albuquerque de Andrade.

Diorama from Brazil

The pieces in the exhibit are from the collection of Fomento Cultural Banamex.  The exhibit will be at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles from November 9, 2014 through September 13, 2015. It requires tickets for reserved time entries.

With more than a thousand pieces in the exhibit, my pictures are just a sampling. For more photos of some of the amazing pieces in this exhibit, click HERE.