Melanesia: art and encounter

Since 1946, with the Museum of Modern Art’s release of Art of the South Seas (Linton and Wingert 1946), the exhibition catalog that accompanied the first major exhibition of Oceanic art in the United States at the Museum, every decade or two has seen a new catalog or richly illustrated book on Pacific art that stands as a statement and perhaps a weighty outline of where the study of Oceanic art currently is and the current questions anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians are asking. Melanesia: Art and Encounter, edited by Lissant Bolton, Nicholas Thomas, Elizabeth Bonshek, Julie Adams, and Ben Burt is one of those books.