Holland Museum
March 7, 2009 – March 14, 2010

ARCHIPELAGO:
Indigenous Art of Indonesia & Melanesia

2009 marks the 400th anniversary of the Dutch presence in what is now the United States.  In 1609 English explorer Henry Hudson, under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, sailed up the river that eventually bore his name: New York’s Hudson River. Thirteen years earlier, in 1596, Dutch explorer Cornelis de Houtman, sent by Amsterdam merchants to find a source of spices, made the first Dutch contact with the islands of modern-day Indonesia and Melanesia.  
 
These two early expeditions began the process of the Netherlands establishing colonies in North America and in the archipelagos of Southeast Asia.  New Netherland was surrendered to the British in 1664 and became New York. The Dutch presence in Southeast Asia and Melanesia lasted much longer.  At the end of World War II, the people of the colonial Dutch East Indies declared independence from the Netherlands, and renamed their country Indonesia.
 
The adjacent Indonesian and Melanesian archipelagos are home to incredibly diverse cultures bound together by geographic location.  Stretching from Malaysia to northeastern Australia, the archipelagos consist of at least 20,000 islands, most uninhabited, an ever-changing number due to shifting tectonic plates, volcanic activity, and ocean levels.
 
The islands of Indonesia are a subtle blending of every culture that ever invaded them – Melanesian, Austronesian, Indian, Chinese, Arab, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Indonesia is home to over one hundred ethnic groups who speak at least 300 distinct languages, and has the world’s largest Muslim population.
 
Melanesia, with its volcanic and coral islands and atolls, has a landmass of 371,803 square miles – nearly four times the size of Michigan – but stretching for 3,500 miles from the Maluku (Spice) Islands to Fiji.  Of Melanesian (African) and Austronesian (Taiwanese) ancestry, the peoples of Melanesia have diverse regional cultures, based in Animism, but developed in isolation, and in the 20th century mostly supplanted by Christianity.    
 
The core of this exotic, and in some ways astonishing collection was formed by the museum’s founder, Willard C. Wichers.  From 1941 to 1973, Wichers directed the Holland, Michigan branch of the Netherlands Information Bureau, a war- and post-wartime propaganda agency of the Dutch Government.  Through his governmental connections, and subsequent private donors, the Holland Museum is able to present this exhibit from the archipelagos of Indonesia and Melanesia.