New documentary displays contemporary Asmat life at St. Thomas

Over the last 10 years, Indonesia-based National Geographic Explorer Joshua Irwandi has made several trips to New Guinea. Images of Asmat feasts were what initially piqued his interest prior to his first trip, and he said they were his most powerful experiences.

“I have been witness to about seven feasts,” Irwandi said. “When the masks are released back into the village, people will start waving, crying, throwing themselves into the mud. It is singularly the most emotional and also the most bizarre scene anyone would have the privilege to encounter.”

As a documentary photographer, Irwandi has made connections with the Asmat people, a culture located on the southwest coast of the island of New Guinea, and helped to tell the world about their contemporary culture and the challenges they face.

Irwandi and Maia Nuku, curator for Oceanic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, came to St. Thomas on Nov. 14 to give a presentation about their experiences and to show a new four-minute film titled, “Not a Blank Canvas” about the gradual changes in Asmat culture. Nuku said she collaborated with Irwandi for the film, which is to be displayed in the reinstallation of Oceanic Art at the MET to connect real people to the art. 

However, St. Thomas community members need not book a plane ticket to New York or make plans to travel to Asmat just yet: the video is also on display in the American Museum of Asmat Art on the second floor of the Anderson Student Center, along with a larger curated collection.

Gretchen Burau, the director of the American Museum of Asmat Art, said though Asmat is over 8,000 miles from St. Thomas, its history can be traced back to Minnesota.

The American Crosier Fathers and Brothers first went to Asmat in 1958 and many of the members of that Catholic organization were from Minnesota, Burau said. The missionaries realized that the people in Asmat were losing some of their cultural traditions like carving and weaving. 

Bishop Alphonse Sowada was an advocate of the Asmat arts. He was a Minnesota farm boy who went to Asmat in 1969 and spent 40 years there as a missionary and later became the youngest bishop in the history of the Catholic Church, Burau said. An article from the St. Thomas Newsroom highlighted him as he personally donated over 300 works from his own collection to the American Museum of Asmat Art.

“He kind of combined Catholic teachings with indigenous beliefs and made that pairing,” Burau said. “And so people were still producing art and engaging with those past traditions, yet in a kind of different way.”

Burau said that, in the post-Vatican II spirit, the American Crosier Fathers and Brothers wanted to keep the people’s artistic efforts going. They started an art museum in Asmat and also brought it to the United States. In 2007, the missionaries gave the artwork from the museums to the University of St. Thomas to use for educational purposes. 

“A lot of classes come through, mainly art history and museum studies, but the College of Arts and Sciences students from other departments also work with the collection, developing exhibitions. And we even have a biology student that has been testing the objects for different types of bacteria,” Burau said. 

The museum’s mission is to preserve the art as well as to “exhibit it and promote intercultural awareness,” Burau said. It works with different departments so that students can learn about other parts of the world and other ways of living.

“One of the projects we’re working on at St. Thomas, through me and with student help, is to create a database that has a geographical component, where a person from Asmat or from the outside could look at a certain village and say, … ‘A bag from this village is now at the British Museum,’ so people from that region can actually engage with their own cultural heritage,” Burau said.

Though the main collection came from the American Crosier group, Burau and the curators that came before her have helped to add to the museum. Burau traveled to Asmat in 2019 and collected a woven mat and a baby carrier made by Asmat women from an art auction. The art in the museum was collected from the 1960s to 2019, though Burau said many visitors think it is ancient. 

“It is a living culture that’s still making art and engaging with those traditions, so that’s what we like to show as much as possible: that there’s still people creating,” Burau said. 

The American Museum of Asmat Art is not the only collection that is providing a contemporary perspective on Asmat culture. 

One of the additions Nuku included in an Asmat art curation coming to the MET was to animate the galleries with Pacific voices to provide “contemporary context” and “enhance interpretation” of the art.

“(The renovation) just really shows the interface that kind of projects we do at the museum with artists and photographers and practitioners, how they can really bring the collections to life and allow our visitors to understand that these are very dynamic, living cultures, and that’s a really important aspect of what we do with collections as museum curators,” Nuku said.

This large collection of Asmat art, along with over 2,000 artworks from 31 countries and 223 cultures, will be a part of the Oceanic Art reinstallation at the MET that opens in the spring of 2025, Nuku said. 

Asmat artworks on display at the MET include spirit canoes, body masks, drums and bis poles. Nuku said that because many of these pieces are made with natural materials, they are not made to last forever and that the materials’ natural life cycle makes it a challenge to preserve or change the look of the art. 

Both Nuku and Burau said the addition of photographs and videos in the exhibits helps to give real-life perspective to the art pieces. Burau gave the example of a mask in the museum that now looks brown and dried-out but features photos that show how it looked when it was fertile and in movement at its creation. 

The landscape of Asmat is ever-changing as new cultures move in and the Asmat population decreases or is pushed out, Irwandi said. He said that by 2030, Papuans will make up less than 17% of the population in Papu alone, with the people of Asmat being only a fraction of that percentage.

“The Asmat is not a blank canvas that easily absorbs a new kind of paint,” Irwandi said. “Their canvas was pigmented so apt and so raw in the manner that only they know. Some people from the outside just decide that’s not the color they want to see.”

Irwandi said the majority of the Asmat people’s sentences these days end with a question mark. Such sentences include: “Why did the young generation become too lazy to join the feasts? Why do foreigners come inside and tell us what to do? What will the future of our children be like?”

Irwandi said he hopes that when people view “Not a Blank Canvas,” their takeaway will be that culture is the most important value and that they will consider the cultural strength of the Asmat people. Though he is not a member of the Asmat community, he said his experience in Asmat was deeply personal and inspirational.

“I am a mere traveler on a continuum of travelers that have spent time in the homelands of the Asmat,” Irwandi said. “As a journalist, we are only allowed to document everything within the confines of our lifetime. So here I am just to share my story.” 

Elaina Mankowski can be reached at mank2823@stthomas.edu.