BODY ART: MARKS OF IDENTITY November 20, 1999-May 29, 2000
New Exhibition Exploring Body Art Practices in Cultures Worldwide over Three Millennia Inaugurates New Gallery in Starr Natural Science Building

Body Art: Marks of Identity, a new exhibition exploring the ways in which human beings around the world, past and present, decorate their bodies, opens at the American Museum of Natural History on November 20, 1999, and remains on view through May 29, 2000. Illuminating both cultural invention and individual artistry, Body Art: Marks of Identity presents over 600 objects and many images from around the world dating from c. 3000 B.C. to the present, including superb sculptures, paintings, contemporary and historical photographs, rare books, engravings, and films. More than half of the objects and images presented are from the Museum's collection; the remainder is from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. The exhibition examines the historical and cultural significance behind ancient and modern body art practices including tattooing, piercing, body painting, body reshaping, henna, and scarification.

Body Art: Marks of Identity inaugurates a new 6500-square-foot gallery on the fourth floor of the recently constructed C.V. Starr Natural Science Building in the Museum.

"Like previous exhibitions on topics such as endangered species and infectious disease, Body Art: Marks of Identity presents a subject of widespread and acute cultural interest to the public," said Ellen V. Futter, President of the American Museum of Natural History. "Body Art tells the story of the universal human practice of body decoration through visually stunning objects and images, more than half of which come from the Museum's vast permanent collection. This show seeks to enhance awareness of the meaning of these marks of identity and human difference, and, thereby, to foster greater understanding of ourselves and others."

The human body is a unique canvas that has been decorated in many ways for millennia by people all over the world. Since the beginning of human history, people have decorated their bodies for many reasons, but there is no known culture in which people do not paint, pierce, tattoo, reshape, or simply adorn their bodies. Whether with permanent marks like tattoos or scars, or temporary decorations like makeup, clothing, and hairstyles, body art is a way of signaling an individual's personal style or place in society, marking a special moment, celebrating a transition in life or simply following a fashion.

What messages do these practices carry? How have they been used to identify us as individuals or as members of a group? How have ideas about what people consider beautiful changed over time? Whether permanent or temporary, found on a bowl or on a belly, these designs, patterns, and shapes are all marks of identity. Body art carries powerful messages about the decorated person. Colors, designs, and the use of particular techniques are part of a visual language with specific cultural meanings. To decipher this language, one needs to understand the shared symbols, myths, social values, and individual memories that are drawn on the body. Since body art can draw attention to cultural differences, it is also a means by which people exoticize and sometimes ostracize others. But body art in all cultures changes, and it is an ideal canvas for individual creativity and self-reinvention. It can also be a way for people to challenge social values and cultural assumptions about beauty, identity, and the body itself.

"For more than a century, the American Museum of Natural History has been a leader in the study of world cultures, and has been home to some of the pioneers of anthropology, such as Dr. Franz Boas and Dr. Margaret Mead," said Craig Morris, Dean of Science. "The Museum brings to the public exhibitions that portray the great diversity of world cultures past and present, conducts anthropology research on every continent, and devotes major educational efforts to teaching the public the importance of understanding cultural diversity. Body Art: Marks of Identity is a scholarly and thoroughly comparative survey of the topic - a scientific and anthropological exhibition in the Museum's best tradition."

Some of the artifacts showcased in Body Art: Marks of Identity include body-decorating implements, such as Japanese, Polynesian, and contemporary Western tattooing tools; tattoo and body painting stamps from Borneo, Africa, and Native North America; ceramic and wooden sculptures and masks depicting body painting, piercing, scarification, and tattooing; shoes worn by Chinese women with bound feet; textiles with patterns similar to scarification marks or body painting designs; ornaments including lip plugs and ear spools from Africa, South America, Mexico, and the U.S.; antique flash (the drawings used in Western tattooing); and rare books -- including the oldest known book ever published on body art -- engravings, and paintings showing early depictions of body art. Among the many photographs displayed are close-up images of Japanese tattoos and American men and women with neo-tribal piercing.

"Body Art: Marks of Identity explores many of the ways in which people around the world have marked and decorated their bodies as signs of civilization, social identity, and individuality," said Enid Schildkrout, curator and chair of the Division of Anthropology and curator of the exhibition. "This exhibition explores the meaning of body art in many different cultures, past and present. In looking at varied ways people illuminate and alter their bodies, this exhibition is intended to challenge some of the assumptions people make when they both look at others and look at themselves."

The Exhibition
Body Art: Marks of Identity examines a wide range of practices in the following sections of the exhibition: Introduction, Origins, Representations, Transformations, Identities, Distinctions, and Reinvention.

Section I: Introduction
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 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.

Section II: Origins
In Origins, visitors will have the opportunity to learn about the earliest uses of body art through archeological sculptures and ornaments, including those from Egypt and Greece, as well as objects from ancient Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, and Costa Rica, dating back as early at 3000 BC.

If the impulse to create art is a defining sign of humanity, the body may well have been the first canvas. Alongside paintings on cave walls visited by early people over 30,000 years ago, we find handprints, ochre deposits, and ornaments. And because the dead were often buried with valuable possessions and provisions for the afterlife, ancient burials reveal that people have been tattooing, piercing, painting, and shaping their bodies for millennia.

All of the major forms of body art known today appear in the ancient world, and there is no evidence indicating a single place of origin for particular techniques. Like people today, ancient peoples used body art to express identification with certain people and distinction from others. Through body art, members of a group could define the ideal person and highlight differences between individuals and groups. In the past, as today, body art may have been a way of communicating ideas about the afterlife and about the place of the individual in society.

A variety of objects demonstrate the use of body art in ancient times including an Egyptian fish-shaped make-up palette from 3650 BC to 3300 BC; a painted Greek vase from the fifth century BC depicting tattooed Thracian women; a ceramic spout bottle depicting the pierced face of a Moche warrior of Peru from AD 100-700; and ceramics of painted Nayarit women from 300 BC to 300 AD.

Section III: Representations
As people from one culture encounter people from another, the diversity of body art can be a source of inspiration, admiration, and imitation. Yet since body art can so clearly signal cultural differences, it can also be a way for people from one culture to exoticize and ostracize others.

From the earliest voyages of discovery to contemporary tourism, travelers of all sorts -- explorers and missionaries, soldiers and sailors, traders and tourists -- have brought back images of the people they meet. These images sometimes reveal as much about the people looking at the body art as about the people making and wearing it. Some early depictions of Europeans and Americans by non-Westerners emphasized elaborate clothing and facial hair. Alternatively, Western images of Africans, Polynesians, and Native Americans focused on the absence of clothes and the presence of tattoos, body paint, and patterns of scars.

Attitudes toward body art change over time, reflecting both shifting political relationships between groups and changing attitudes toward the body. Representations of body art in engravings, paintings, photographs, and film are powerful visual metaphors that have been used both to record cultural differences and to proclaim one group's supposed superiority over another.

Highlights of Representations include the earliest engravings printed by Theodor De Bry, based on actual observations of the Indians of the Americas by Jacques Le Moyne de Morques and John White, dating from the 16th century; images of the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, based on impressions of Native Americans commingled with Roman accounts; books and engravings from Captain Cook's voyage to the Pacific; a wall of postcards and photographs of body art from around the world, including carnivals and world's fairs, showing how body art became a common theme of tourism; and excerpts from two films: a documentary featuring Nuba men in southeastern Sudan who painted their bodies, originally to win the favor of their wives and wives' families, and, ultimately to profit from tourists; and "Cannibal Tours," a documentary produced by the BBC, showing the interaction between tourists who collect souvenirs and take photographs of the peoples of Papua, New Guinea and the New Guineans' reactions to the curiosity of the tourists.

Section IV: Transformations
Body art can serve as a link with ancestors, deities or spirits and mediate the relationships between people and the supernatural world. In central Borneo tattoos are sometimes used as a protective shield against evil, as are objects with the same designs worn on or surrounding the body. Selk'nam men in Tierra del Fuego painted their bodies to transform themselves into spirits during initiation ceremonies. African figure sculptures in wood or stone often display scarification marks that sometimes identify them as specific ancestors or deities.

Masks with facial markings can also be used to connect the world of the living with the world of spirits, and sometimes with the dead. Like tattoos and body paint, masks create a second skin that serves as a bridge between the ordinary world of the living and the forces that are believed to control human destiny.

In Transformations, examples of body art practiced for spiritual reasons include painted masks worn by Indians of the Northwest Coast to connect with animal spirits and guardians of the spirit world; a collection of Borneo tattoo stamps, which allowed tattooists to make designs that protected people from spiritual forces; a Yoruba offering bowl held by a female figure representing a deity whose body is decorated with scarification patterns; a pot of the Conibo people of Peru with design patterns that come from a boa snake whose body was believed to enclose the cosmos; drawings by Australian Aborigines recording both their body painting and the location of sacred places in the landscape and a series of photos from 1923 of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego, whose bodies are covered with paint.

Section V: Identities
Body art links the individual to a social group as an insider, by asserting a shared body art language. Body art can also distinguish outsiders, by proclaiming a separate identity. This concept is explored in Identities, which includes exhibits on tattooing in Japan, New Zealand, the Marquesan Islands, and the contemporary U.S, as well as African and Western piercing.

Elaborate, pictorial Japanese tattooing started among men in certain occupational groups, such as firemen and rickshaw drivers. Upper class people disapproved of tattooing and instead wore fine clothing forbidden to the lower class. In parts of Polynesia, on the other hand, geometric tattoo designs indicated high rank, and the most powerful people had the most extensive tattoos.

Body art practices can change rapidly, reflecting larger shifts in society. Tattooing virtually disappeared in Polynesia, partly due to Western influence, but it is now being revived as an assertion of ethnic identity. Western body art, including everything from piercing to shoe styles, also indicates a person's social identity.

In a complex and diverse society, when certain types of body art are shunned by some, they can become signs of rebellion for others. But as unfashionable body art practices become the norm, they lose their power to define group membership and instead express individual choices and life experiences.

A gallery wall displays the photographs of Sandi Fellman, whose images show the elaborate, pictorial tattoos on Japanese men. Other highlights include photographs of Maori tattoos, called "Moko," along with a wooden door panel that features the same designs used in Maori tattooing, as well as photographs of full-bodied tattoos on Polynesian men of the Marquesas Islands.

This section also explores contemporary Western tattooing. It includes traditional "flash" dating from the turn of the century to the present, a collection tattoo machines, a gallery of photographs by William DeMichele of tattooed people, and "Flash," a film produced by the Museum. The film includes interviews with both tattoo artists as well as with people who have tattoos.

Also featured in Identities is a section on piercing, which includes a gallery wall of photographs by Bettina Witteven, whose images depict "neo-tribal" piercing in the U.S., as well as a display case of Zulu ear plugs -- originally part of a coming-of-age ceremony to open a child's ears, so that he or she could develop an adult's understanding of life, and later, a sign of ethnic identity and beauty.

Section VI: Distinctions
In many cultures, body art defines and highlights both the transition from childhood to adulthood and the distinctions between men and women. It not only gives meaning to age and gender but also honors beauty, bravery and the acquisition of knowledge.

Transitions between one life stage and another are often seen as dangerous. To ensure her good fortune, an Indian bride's hands and feet are decorated with henna, while a Chokwe girl's body is covered in white kaolin for protection during initiation.

Distinctions can be made permanently visible through scarification, tattooing, or various forms of body shaping. People in some societies use body art to honor elders, while in others makeup and plastic surgery conceal signs of aging. Scarification may mark a woman in Africa as ready for marriage, while some Native American men were once tattooed to celebrate their strength and bravery. Bodies of both men and women, young and old, are shaped and molded, sometimes in drastic ways, to emphasize their beauty and attractiveness.

The section features a Chinese foot binding display case with objects including actual shoes, as well as photographs and shadow puppets of women wearing the shoes; an exhibit displaying corsets, bras, and bustles worn by Western women; a henna display with photos, jewelry, and application tools; six very fine wood figures from central Africa, showing men's and women's scarification marks -- signs of beauty and prestige; a Mangbetu man photographed around 1910 showing his bound and elongated head; a Native American painted deerskin collected in the 18th century that formerly hung in the "King's Cabinet" in Versailles; and a painting by John Verelst, painted in 1710, showing one of the four Iroquois chiefs who visited London in the early 18th century. Other highlights include labrettes and masks worn by Eskimos, Native American clothing and tattoo instruments, a painting of a Mohawk Chief with body painting, and a photo of a Mangbetu infant, whose head is being bound for reshaping.

Section VII: Reinvention
In Reinvention, the exhibition's final section, visitors can explore the uses of body art as a means of crossing cultural boundaries. Worldwide travel, large-scale migrations, and increasing access to global networks of communication mean that body art today is a kaleidoscopic mix of traditional practices and new inventions. Materials, designs, and practices move from one cultural context to another, and practices are given new meanings as they traverse cultural and social boundaries.

Body art allows people to reinvent themselves -- to rebel, to follow fashion, or to experiment with new identities. Like performance artists and actors, people in everyday life use body art to cross boundaries of gender, national identity, and cultural stereotypes.

Finally, this section uses a mirrored video installation to highlight body art in contemporary theater, masquerades, and carnivals, and enables visitors to look at themselves with a new perspective and understanding.

Body Art: Marks of Identity focuses on some of the many ways in which people, past and present, have marked their skin and shaped their bodies. Sometimes people of one culture find the practices of another culture or even a sub-group within their culture foreign to their own experience. This exhibition is meant to encourage a thoughtful examination of body art and identity, and does not judge or condone any practices or sets of practices.

Education and Special Programming
In conjunction with the exhibition Body Art: Marks of Identity, the American Museum of Natural History has developed a full complement of programs for adults, children, students, and teachers, including lectures, panel discussions, family programs, multicultural programs and educators' workshops. (Please see "Educational and Special Programming" for more details.)

According to Myles Gordon, Vice President for Education at the Museum, the exhibition is a particularly good complement to the New York State middle school and high school curriculum Learning Standards that call for students "to develop an understanding of world cultures and civilizations, including an analysis of important ideas, social and cultural values, beliefs, and traditions."

The Museum has prepared an informative and engaging guide for visitors, as well as a guide specifically designed for teachers, including background information, activities for the classroom, and a poster. The guide emphasizes how to use the exhibition to meet State curriculum standards across many subject areas. A special preview and workshop for teachers is planned for early December.

"Body Art is topic of great interest to the public and thus serves as a rich and wonderful educational opportunity," said Myles Gordon. "The exhibition presents a diverse collection of fascinating images and objects, drawn mainly from the Museum's collection, representing every corner of the globe and spanning thousands of years. It is a powerful setting for exploring anthropology and for developing critical skills of observation and analysis that are essential for learning. With its diversity of cultures, striking artifacts, and anthropological perspective, Body Art: Marks of Identity is a valuable and engaging resource for teachers and students at the middle and high school levels to meet curriculum standards in the classroom."

Curatorial Organization
Body Art: Marks of Identity was curated by Dr. Enid Schildkrout, Chair and Curator, Division of Anthropology. Additional support was provided by Division of Anthropology Curators Craig Morris, Laurel Kendall, Charles Spencer, David Hurst Thomas, Robert Carneiro, Stanley Freed, and Ian Tattersall, as well as Judith Levinson, Ann Fitzgerald, Pravina Shukla, and the staff of the Anthropology Division and Office of the Registrar.

Exhibition Design and Installation
The exhibition was designed and executed by the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Exhibition, under the direction of David Harvey, vice president for Exhibition; key exhibition and design services provided by Paul dePass, Jayne Hertko, Lauri Halderman, David Clinard, Robert Vinci, Frank Rasor, Geralyn Abinader, Melissa Posen, Stephen Quinn, and Steven Warsavage.

The Museum
The American Museum of Natural History, since its founding in 1869, has been one of the world's preeminent institutions for scientific and cultural research and education, with a commitment to engage the public in the wonder of discovery. The Museum is one of the largest natural history museums in the world. Renowned for its significant temporary and permanent exhibitions, adult and family education programs, and fundamental scientific research, the Museum is comprised of 23 interconnected buildings, housing 43 permanent exhibition halls, a wide array of research laboratories, teaching facilities, one of the Western hemisphere's largest natural history libraries, and a collection of 32 million specimens and cultural artifacts. With a scientific staff of more than 200, including more than 44 curators, the Museum supports research departments in the Division of Anthropology; the Division of Physical Sciences including Astrophysics and Earth and Planetary Sciences; Paleontology; Invertebrate Zoology; and Vertebrate Zoology.

The Museum will open its eagerly anticipated Rose Center for Earth and Space, featuring a completely rebuilt and rejuvenated Hayden Planetarium, as well as the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Hall of the Universe and the recently opened Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth, in February, 2000.