Welcome to our virtual gallery! Exhibitions listed below are available only online.
Click here to see our list of current exhibitions in the Museum gallery.
Portraits of India: Markets, Merchants, and Artisans
This exhibition explores how people relate to objects through their occupations of producing, selling, and repairing them. The 48 images on display were chosen from a collection of about 1700 photographs taken by anthropologist Dr. Richard Lerner in 1968–1970 and 1988–1989. The three sections focus on artisans, merchants and service-providers. Supplementing these are a case of objects documented in the photos, and two video programs: an edited version of film footage shot by Lerner, and a series of still photographs of the Indian-American community in Berkeley, taken by Aditya Dhawan, an Indian architect, designer, and visual documentarian.
The South Pacific Portraiture of Caroline Mytinger
Caroline Mytinger was born in 1897 in Sacramento, California. She was a noted portrait artist of important and wealthy Americans during the first half of the 20th century. Her love of adventure and interest in native cultures led her to travel to Guatemala, Haiti, Panama, and eventually to the South Pacific. In 1926 she set out with a friend, Margaret Warner, on a four-year journey to paint portraits of the tribes people in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
As featured in the April 2006 issue of Smithsonian Magazine
Tesoros Escondidos: Hidden Treasures from the Mexican Collections
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology unveils its holdings from the country of Mexico through the exhibition, Tesoros Escondidos: Hidden Treasures from the Mexican Collections. The 250 items selected for the exhibition are prized examples culled from the permanent collection and were chosen especially for their craftsmanship, rarity, age, and sheer beauty. With few exceptions, these artifacts have never before been publicly exhibited.
A Century of Collecting
Drawing from 3.8 million objects collected over a century the exhibition A Century of Collecting examines artifact collecting as a form of cultural representation, presenting objects from around the world. Displays focus on the systematic character of these collections and provide original contexts for the objects, which increases our understanding of the peoples who made and used them. The objects on display have been selected to represent our major accessions, arranged primarily by chronology but also by sub-discipline and region. At the same time, the display explains how anthropology museums go about their work of preserving and interpreting the world's diverse cultures.
Images from the Georgia-Chechnya Border, 1970–1980: Visual Anthropology of the Peripheries
The presentation offers a rare and intimate view of the landscape, architecture, people, and traditions of Khevsureti, Georgia, and neighboring Chechnya and Ingushetia, one of the most remote and historical regions of the Caucasus. Images from the Georgia-Chechnya Border is the latest in the museums series of rotating photography exhibits documenting diverse cultures, as part of the research discipline known as visual anthropology. The exhibit is organized by the Hearst Museum of Anthropology with the assistance of guest curators Vakhtang Chikovani and Shorena Kurtsikidze, natives of Georgia who are currently residing in the Bay Area.
The World in a Frame:
Photographs From the Great Age of Exploration, 1865–1915
The viewer will be captivated by the beauty and intricate detail of these picturesNative American portraits, wilderness landscapes of the American West, images of ancient ruins of the Southwest, and monumental architecture in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. The majority of the images on view are albumen prints, made with eggwhites that yield rich yellow and brown tones; most have not been publicly exhibited in decades. Featured are works by Carleton E. Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Edward S. Curtis, John Hillers, William Henry Jackson, Frederick Monsen, Maison Bonfils, and Felice Beato.
Tzintzuntzan, Mexico: Photographs by George Foster
George M. Foster — professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley from 1953 to
1979 — is well known for his half century of ethnographic fieldwork in
Tzintzuntzan, a town on Lake Pátzcuaro, in Michoacán, Mexico. This work has
formed the basis for important contributions to the study of peasant
societies and to the subfields of medical and applied anthropology. Until
now, however, his extensive use of photography has remained largely hidden.
This exhibition is based on nearly 4,000 photographs in black and white,
color, and 16 mm film formats, shot by George Foster over more than half a
century (1945–1999). The chosen selection of photographs and text
accompaniment provide an engrossing portrait of a Mexican peasant community
in the twentieth century.
