One of the most significant touring exhibitions of Aboriginal Australian art ever staged returns to the city where it was first envisioned. 

New Guinea culture is all about finding ways to connect with others, sometimes across great distances: engaging in trade, acquiring new kin through marriage and adoption, and learning other people’s customs and languages. Carved from a hollowed-out tree trunk, the slit drum, or garamut, is used not only to accompany singing and dances but also to summon people to gather and to send important announcements by beating rhythmic signals on the drum’s resonant body with a wooden pounding stick.

Micheals is an activist working with Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women; Community Against Violence; American Indian College Fund; Big Brother & Big Sister; Art Smart; and Preservation of Native Culture and Natural Resources.

This dynamic selection of 20th- and 21st-century artworks from the museum’s permanent collection explores the ways that art can speak to or question the formal, physical, environmental, social, and institutional structures of our world. 

Carving wooden sitting benches is a longstanding artistic practice among the Indigenous peoples in Brazil. These wooden benches are utilized for ceremonial purposes and everyday use in their communities. Some are zoomorphic, representing animals of the Brazilian fauna and spiritual entities, while others take a more geometrical seat shape, painted with natural pigments or carved in eloquent designs.

Drawn from the permanent collection of The Fralin Museum of Art, the works of art on view in the Joanne B. Robinson Object Study Gallery highlight the role of the collections in teaching.