Ceremonial, everyday objects wow guests at CT museum. This exhibit is a first of its kind

They are ceremonial and everyday objects from Pacific islands that few Americans have visited, if they have even heard of them.

Fiji, Togo, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, New Caledonia: Islands spread across thousands of miles of the Earth’s largest ocean.

They are made of bark, fiber and wood. Huge lances that are not for defense but for ceremony. Masks that may be frightening or comical.

For the first time ever, they are on display in the Yale Peabody Museum ’s second-largest gallery, the Hall of the Pacific, on loan from the collection of Thomas Jaffe , Yale class of 1971, owner of a New York-based graphic design and branding business called ThoughtMatter .

“We’re really excited about it. It’s the first time I’m told that there’s ever been a permanent exhibit of the arts from the Pacific, of Oceania,” said Virginia-Lee Webb , consulting curator, an art historian rather than an archaeologist, who previously worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art .

“I was brought on to help present the art because I have a background in it, studying it and researching it, and to provide a framework for people in our colleagues in the Pacific and in the international academic world, to have their voices presented,” she said.

She worked with Charmaine Wong, the Peabody’s collections manager for anthropology.

“That was our main goal for this hall is to have the Pacific voices told, tell the stories to the sculptures,” Webb said. “So that’s what we did. We did a lot of outreach … We worked together, joined at the hip, on this for over two years.”

The hall is arranged geographically, and there are areas that are not represented, Webb said.

“It’s not always encyclopedic,” she said. “We don’t have anything from Easter Island, for instance, Australia. There’s no bark paintings, traditional bark paintings or dot paintings. … So there are things that people might expect to see, but they’re not here. So that’s one thing that’s important. But there are some incredible strengths as a private collection, because of a couple of factors.”

One is that museums have deaccessioned pieces, perhaps because they had multiple examples of the same piece, Webb said. Those may have been sold in international auctions.

“I would say the past two decades, that a lot of museums deaccessioned material for various reasons,” she said. “Some museums have five of each, but they’re colonial museums from countries where they really went in and hoovered the place, as the expression goes.”

Those pieces were then sold in international auctions. Other pieces were dispersed from private estates, Webb said.

“But the collector Tom Jaffe, he has an incredible eye and has really done his homework and was there at the right time and was able to really make some good choices,” she said.

As an example, she pointed to several heavy clubs from Fiji, one called a pineapple club because of its resemblance to the fruit, another formed from a root. “People know the Fijian material because of the clubs; they’re quite popular,” she said.

“Some of them were war clubs, some really were used as weapons,” she said. “They’re quite heavy. And some of them were really more for prestige.”

A less warlike exhibit from Fiji is bark cloth in various shades of brown.

Moving on to Aotearoa/New Zealand, Webb pointed to a ceremonial cloak, an example of those that are still in use today by the Maori people. “They’re passed down through generations as well,” she said. “So it’s quite an important object.”

A fish hook from Tahiti is just one representative. “I can have a whole wall of different kinds of fish hooks, many different kinds and materials, but this is a really quite wonderful one from this area, with turtle shell and bone,” Webb said.

There is also a squid or octopus lure. “It lays on the bottom and the squid comes and thinks it’s a prey and sits on it,” she said. “And all I have to do is pull up this. Very ingenious.”

Another example of bark cloth is from French Polynesia, still made and used today. “It’s typically a ficus tree or a paper mulberry tree,” Webb said. “And it’s the inner bark that’s softened with water in strips. And it’s pounded and then they’re pounded together to make large and small things. They’re worn. Some of them are presentations, some of them are walked on.”

There are a pair of masks Webb called signature pieces of the hall.

“It’s quite an old piece. It’s a Tago mask,” she said. “It’s native from the Tami Islands, which is part of Papua New Guinea. And again, it’s made of bark cloth, wood, rattan, some seeds. It’s quite rare. And this one particularly was collected between 1898 and 1899.”

Each family had a different mask design, Webb said.

“They’re really quite rare and they used to come out as a group,” she said.  “They came very rarely together. And each clan had different designs. So if you were part of that family, you would recognize those designs immediately.

“They adjudicated disputes as well, different ways by their presence,” she said. “They could decide right or wrong, who wins a dispute. But the masks were made in secret. No one knew who was wearing them or where they were made. They came out from the bush and they’d come running into the village.”

One wall is dedicated to the island of New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island. But there is an invisible line dividing the wall.

“The island is split in half politically,” Webb said. “The eastern half is the independent state of Papua New Guinea. …  The western half is part of Indonesia called Papua. So it’s very confusing.”

Among the exhibits is a ceremonial house. “The facades are painted,” Webb said. The front “would have been almost like a triangle, narrower at the top,” she said. “And these objects here, particularly the figures and the smaller figures, would have been stored in the lower part of the house. Very important.”

As young people are initiated into adult society, “they’re told and allowed to see certain objects, the same way we’re allowed to take Communion or see and hold a Torah,” she said.

A crocodile represents a creation myth from Papua New Guinea. “It’s thought that in primal times, the world was all water, and the crocodile came up and on its back Earth was formed,” Webb said.

Chris Norris, director of public programs for the Peabody, called the new hall “absolutely stunning. Virginia and Charmaine have done an incredible job with this material.”

“This is an extraordinary collection of its type,” he said. “The stuff that you see here that was collected decades ago, in some cases more than a century ago, it’s been in private collections and other museums moving around within the Western art market over time. I don’t think it’s ever been gathered together in one place before. So to have it here at the Peabody, in our second-largest gallery, is an amazing opportunity to share it with the public.

“But I also think the other thing that is really remarkable about it is the way that Charmaine and Virginia have been able to pull together so many different voices from across the Pacific regions, so many people, so many experts, many of whom are indigenous experts in the culture and bring their voices into the gallery,” Norris said.

“That’s something that we’ve been trying to do across the museum,” he said. “It’s a change in the narrative approach for the museum to provide not just one monolithic curatorial voice, but a variety of different voices. We think that brings much richness in experience for visitors.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com .