Volume 18, Number 7, November 15, 2001 Issue

More Asmat art to arrive

The nearly 950 Asmat cultural items that Holmes Museum director Jerry Martin collected this summer in Irian Jaya haven’t even been unwrapped yet, but WSU’s collection of Asmat art is about to get bigger, thanks to a gift from a Chicago collector.

Asmat art owned by Peter Bakwin is on its way to WSU. The collection of more than 100 pieces is valued at $240,000. Bakwin is chairman of MB Financial, a large banking organizaton in Chicago.

Those pieces will join the items Martin collected during an expedition funded by WSU donors Barry and Paula Downing. That collection arrived late last month from Irian Jaya.

The donated pieces had been collected by Bakwin with the help of Patti Seery. Seery, an Indonesian cultural expert based in Chicago, organized WSU’s Asmat art expedition to the Indonesian province.

Some of the items in the corporate collection are similar to what Martin collected this summer. However, the collection does include a number of shields from the Citak region of Irian Jaya — the Asmat living in that region no longer produce ceremonial art.

The Citak region is in a Protestant-controlled area that bans cultural ceremonies. The Catholic church, which started sending missionaries into the region in 1958, didn’t ban the art-making traditions, only the headhunting and warring aspects of the ceremonies that accompanied those traditions.

The Bakwin collection will enhance WSU’s Downing collection, which is one of the largest Asmat art collections in the United States and the largest owned by a U.S. university.

- Amy Geiszler-Jones