Pasadena’s USC Pacific Asia Museum is mounting a new exhibition featuring over fifty paintings collected in Bali by cultural anthropologists Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) and Margaret Mead (1901-1978) during their fieldwork on the island from 1936 until 1939.
Bali: Agency and Power in Southeast Asia will open March 18 and run through June 12.
Using the paintings as a foundation for exploring Balinese people’s stories, beliefs, and daily lives, the exhibition guides museum visitors to a greater understanding of this often romanticized but frequently misunderstood island and examines the role that painters, tourists, and anthropologists had in shaping new art styles that communicate detailed aspects of Balinese society and beliefs.
The fascination that non-Balinese have with the island took shape in the 1930s when expatriates and Western tourists began pouring into Bali. When cultural anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead arrived in Bali for fieldwork in 1936, they found a group of foreign artists and researchers whose interactions with the Balinese had profound effects on both sides.
New painting practices blossomed from this exchange, with Balinese artists incorporating Western naturalistic techniques and creating paintings for foreign travelers to purchase and collect. The painters of Batuan gained power and agency to tell their stories and depict their worldview in this new style.
Bateson and Mead focused their attention on this new genre of painting originating from the village of Batuan, a community in central Bali that has become renowned for the detailed paintings created there.
Bateson and Mead collected 845 paintings from Batuan from 1936 to 1939, working with artists whose pictures illustrated cultural heritage through the depiction of local stories.
The new exhibit, entitled ‘Bali: Agency and Power in Southeast Asia,’ brings together 54 of these paintings and other objects from USC PAM’s permanent collection of Balinese art.
The sheer quantity of paintings produced in Batuan and collected by Bateson and Mead is impressive. Even more important is the insight the paintings provide into Balinese life and the influence these paintings and their artists had on the continued painting production in Batuan for tourists, collectors, and museums.
The film Trance and Dance in Bali, shot by Gregory Bateson and narrated by Margaret Mead, will be screened in the gallery to provide context into the anthropologists’ work on the island and its representation to the broader public.
A second film, created for the exhibition and shot on location in Bali, talks with descendants of the 1930s painters for insight into the lasting effects of the development of new painting genres in Batuan.
In the final gallery of the exhibition, visitors will be able to explore the diversity of narratives and details of the paintings collected by Bateson and Mead and appreciate the inventiveness of the artists as they embraced the opportunity to show their stories and depict their lives in this new painting genre.
USC Pacific Asia Museum is located at 46 North Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena, California.