Visitors are introduced to a variety of body art practices, including tattooing, scarification, body painting, piercing and body shaping. At the entrance, a large photograph taken by Sandi Fellman features the elaborately tattooed legs of Japanese men. This section features six important objects, each from a different part of the world and each illustrating one of the six techniques explored in the exhibition, including an early 20th century painting of Edith Burchett, painted by her husband, George Burchett, a famous English tattooist, who covered his wife's body with tattoos and then painted her portrait; and an oil painting of a Chinook Indian woman from British Columbia by Paul Kane, a 19th century Canadian painter, showing the slanted forehead of the mother and the cradleboard, which flattened her baby's head.

As an example of cosmetics and make-up, the Introduction features a Japanese woodblock print showing a woman with black teeth, a practice done to enhance their appearance. A wooden sculpture of a painted woman from Eastern Nigeria shows how full body painting, ornaments, and elaborate coiffure combine to create an image of a beautiful woman, shown looking at herself in a mirror. A Nayarit ceramic figure from ancient Mexico dating to c. 300 BC presents piercing, a practice that is known from ornaments and figurines dating back thousands of years in many parts of the world. A carved wooden stool from the Iatmul people in Papua New Guinea, collected for the Museum by Margaret Mead on an expedition in the 1920s, illustrates scarification done among the Iatmul on men during initiation.

introduction | origins | representations
transformations | identities | distinctions | reinvention