Islands Beyond Blue
Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection
Denver Art Museum
100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, CO 80204
May 14–ongoing
Admission: Adults: $15 for Colorado residents, $19 for non-residents; Seniors, Students, & Military: $12 for Colorado residents, $16 for non-residents; Youth 18 and Under and Members: Free
Review by José Antonio Arellano
Like tourists embarking on a Pacific excursion, visitors to the newly reopened Arts of Oceania gallery at the Denver Art Museum are greeted by plastic leis. Whereas the kitschy garlands that adorn vacationing travelers adhere to advertised paradisal fantasies, the hundreds of synthetic leis of this installation gather to form a more dismal image—that of an imposing mushroom cloud.
Niki Hastings-McFall (Sāmoan/Pākehā), No Man Is an Island, 2023, mixed media. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
The deep blue-colored walls of the muted gallery are suggestive of dark oceanic hues, a connotation reinforced by an image of a beach on the wall behind the installation. The rumbling sounds that play behind the leis resemble crashing water or thundering clouds, yet the explosive crescendo indexes a history of atomic testing in the Pacific. Insofar as the blue connotes water, perhaps the displayed works are akin to islands, as we are invited to inhabit the tourist gaze—or asked to consider, by reenacting, the movements of an empire.
A view of the title wall and works in the exhibition Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection at the Denver Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
The exhibition Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection confronts the visitors’ learned vocabulary and expectations and exposes the (mis)understanding these can produce. We might know that Picasso and Gauguin were both drawn to the work from the Marquesas Islands and Tahiti, which inspired their creations. The Surrealists felt such a “deep affinity with Pacific art” that on the “Surrealist Map of the World,” published in 1929, the islands of New Guinea, Easter Island, and the Bismark Archipelago appear much larger than Europe and the United States. [1] This familiar knowledge of Oceania, though, comes filtered through Western artists and proves inadequate to understanding the exhibition and the contexts it invokes.
The exhibition makes necessary the reorientation of our conceptual schema. As Anthony Meyer argues, in European art, “the pictorial representation and sculptural forms are simply images of the divine.” [2] In Oceania, however, “artworks in most cases become the actual personifications of the gods, spirits, ancestors, they represent.” [3]
A view of works in the exhibition Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection at the Denver Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
According to Emelihter Kihleng, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Arts of Oceania, the Pacific Peoples prefer the term “treasures” over “objects.” [4] More than semantic hair-splitting, the distinction matters. The term acknowledges the genealogical connections involving spiritual care. Considering the displayed treasures as “art forms” might compel what Nicholas Thomas describes as the “detached contemplation that seems to characterize the Western viewer’s observation of works in art museums." [5] These treasures “were rather used to express accomplishments or parade power.” [6] One man’s souvenir is another man’s treasure, and one museum’s valued collection is another people’s ancestral tending. [7]
Asmat artist, Bisj Memorial Pole, 1900s, wood, fiber, and paint. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
Take, for example, the Memorial Poles displayed in the exhibition. Researchers have studied how, for the Asmat people, the cutting down of Mangrove trees to make the bisj poles is akin to killing and decapitation because the Asmat associated trees with people. According to Anne D’Alleva, “The making of the bisj mimics the taking of a head. The carver cuts down the tree as if he were decapitating an enemy. He then skins the tree, the red sap of which is said to resemble the blood of a man being skinned.” [8]
An installation view of two Bisj Memorial Poles in the Islands Beyond Blue exhibition. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
The poles are carved with figures memorializing dead relatives whom warriors promise to avenge. After the ceremonial use of the bisj poles, they are taken to the swamp to decompose, thus transferring power to the sago palms, crucial sources of nutrients for the Asmat. If we fail to register their spiritual mobility, we misperceive the poles as static, decorative objects. The poles’ inclusion into the gallery—a space that protects by rendering still—provides an opportunity to imagine a more complex, dynamic coexistence. [9]
Marquesan artist, Tattooed Wooden Leg, early 1800s, wood. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
Viewers, though, cannot help but experience the exhibition through the familiar concepts at hand. As I look at a rare wooden leg adorned with complex tattoo designs (one of only thirteen wooden limbs known to exist in collections), I recall Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Roughly contemporaneous with the wooden leg on display, the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, describes the tattoos of Queequeg, a South Sea Islander, as inscrutable and “unearthly.” [10] But when Ishmael attempts to praise the phrenological quality of Queequeg’s head, he reverts to more familiar (to him) Western art, specifically “the popular busts” depicting “George Washington’s head.” [11]
A view of the Tattooed Wooden Leg work in Islands Beyond Blue with part of Niki Hastings-McFall’s lei installation No Man Is an Island. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
Like Ishmael, I invoke this excerpt from Western literature to describe my visual experience, and, like Melville, I am trying to expose the short-sighted inadequacy of the analogy. For when we mediate what we see by imposing foreign genres, we reduce the other to projections of ourselves. The presupposition here is that tatau are meant to be read. As Nicholas Thomas argues in his book Oceanic Arts, however, “While Western art might be seen primarily as a system of meaningful codes, Pacific art suggests that effective action was and is more important than communication.” [12] “Effective action” could refer to exchange practices and ceremonial presentations, indicating status and building alliances.
Mary Jewett Pritchard (American Sāmoan), Siapo Mamanu (Sāmoan Bark Cloth), about 1970, painted bark cloth. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
Thomas’s insight was made apparent to me when beholding Mary Jewett Pritchard’s more recent Siapo Mamanu. Dated to the 1970s, the circular painting of complex, interlinked, floral patterns appears to be in dialogue with contemporary geometric art. Jewett Pritchard, though, was instrumental in maintaining the practice of making bark cloth, which she used as the material support for her painting. [13]
An installation view of the Islands Beyond Blue exhibition with Mary Jewett Pritchard’s Siapo Mamanu on the right. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
Generally known as tapa, but referred to more specifically as siapo in Sāmoa, bark cloth of this kind is traditionally made by groups of women who soaked strips of mulberry bark, which they would collectively and rhythmically beat with mallets, thus achieving the desired thickness and width. Sāmoan siapo tend to be painted with dynamic geometrical shapes linked to plants, flowers, and animals common to Sāmoan life. [14]
What might look to my eyes like abstracted geometrical patterns could actually be linked figuratively, just as the bark cloth itself references practices of ceremonial presentation and exchange. Because it is a more contemporary piece, I think it operates on both registers, as a singular work of 1970s abstract art by Jewett Pritchard and as an homage to a practice collectively made possible by Sāmoan women.
A view of works in Islands Beyond Blue. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
The inclusion of contemporary artists in such exhibitions thus produces a crucial bridge between ancient contexts and contemporary conversations. Niki Hastings-McFall is part of this work. Hastings-McFall has been a champion and ambassador of Oceanic art for decades, and her site-specific “lei bombing” also operates on multiple registers simultaneously. As a gesture critiquing tourist exploitation and nuclear displacement, the installation’s garland tentacles extend behind the displayed treasures, visually joining her work to the past. The tentacular leis both embrace ancestral treasures while operating more darkly as uncomfortable reminders of how nuclear radiation connects us all.
Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection in the Joan and George Anderman Gallery at the Denver Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
This reminder resonates with the installation’s title No Man Is an Island, which references John Donne’s devotional writing. Meditation XVII offers the oft-cited declaration, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man/ is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…” [15] The hopeful universalism of this sentiment is betrayed by its partisan articulation. Whose metaphorical “continent” are we referring to, exactly? Are Pacific Islanders included in this common landmass purportedly supporting us all?
The seventeenth meditation continues by “involving” the speaker and audience in all of “mankind,” to the extent that the death of anyone affects everyone. [16] Upon hearing a death knell, we need not ask “for whom the bell tolls,” because, infamously, “it tolls for thee.” [17] This installation asks us to consider otherwise by contemplating the type of violence enacted when we assume that the other is a stand-in for ourselves.
José Antonio Arellano (he/his) is an Assistant Professor of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. He is currently working on two manuscripts titled Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984 and Life in Search of Form: 20th Century Mexican American Literature and the Problem of Art.
[1] See Anne D’Alleva, Arts of the Pacific Islands (Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 9.
[2] Anthony P. Meyer and Olaf Wipperfürth, Oceanic Art, vol. 2 (Knickerbocker Press, 1996), 630.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Emelihter Kihleng, personal interview, May 11, 2023.
[5] Nicholas Thomas, Oceanic Art (Thames & Hudson, 2018), 31.
[6] Ibid.
[7] The introductory exhibition label “invites you to dive deep, below the serene surface, into the cultures and worldviews of Indigenous Pacific peoples.” The treasures on display “will take you beyond the myth of a Pacific paradise.” Introduction label for Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO.
[8] D’Alleva, 59.
[9] The exhibition caption describes some of the ceremonial functions of the bisj poles, but for a fuller description see Thomas, 71. See also D’Alleva, 59.
[10] Herman Melville, Moby Dick (The Easton Press, 1977), 514, 54. The tattoos seem unreadable even to Queequeg himself as he carves the tattoos onto a wooden surface, their meaning “unsolved to the last” (514). The transcription of the tattoos onto a wooden surface is what prompted me to connect the novel to the wooden leg on display. The only other tattooed wooden limb I am aware of, by the way, is a wooden arm in the Peabody Essex Museum’s collection. It was obtained in 1888 by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island (1883). See Thomas, 96-97.
[11] Melville, 55.
[12] Thomas, 31.
[13] “Artist: Mary Jewett Pritchard.” SIAPO ART OF SAMOA, www.siapo.com/-artisit--mary-jewett-pritchard.html.
[14] “Siapo: The Traditional Fabric of the Samoa Islands.” National Parks Service, www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/siapo-the-traditional-fabric-of-the-samoa-islands.htm.
[15] John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: Together with Death’s Duel (University of Michigan Press, 1959), 108.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
