Sago Spathe Painting Exhibit
The Museum has a collection of over 100 Sago Spathe paintings from New Guinea. Most of the paintings come from a ritual house built in the early 1980s. The initiation cycle was not completed due to dissension among the senior men who were responsible for keeping the initiation going. The paintings were recovered from the ruins of the structure in 1987 by Phillip Guddemi, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. Some paintings that would normally be present were not found. Examples of these were commissioned from local artists.
