Papua New Guinean art

Papua New Guinea has been inhabited by humans for roughly 50,000 years; throughout that period, the hundreds of distinct ethnic groups of the island developed unique artistics traditions and styles.

Statues and figurines, ritual masks, carvings, and weavings, all generally with spiritual and religious significance, comprise a majority of the art created historically in Papua New Guinea.

[1] Many of the villages that eventually developed on the island had little contact with one another due to impassable terrain, causing them to diverge culturally, as evidenced by the ethnic and linguistic diversity present throughout Papua New Guinea.

[4][5] For example, in New Ireland, complex sculptures depicting humans, fish, and birds in a totemic arrangement were, and continue to be, fabricated for malagan ceremonies, which are an intricate series of rituals commemorating death, among other symbolic ideas.

[9] During the Papua New Guinea's period of colonization in the 19th and 20th centuries, European collectors frequently exported art pieces from the colony abroad to England and Australia.

[9] Alongside its newly gained status as an independent nation, a contemporary art movement developed simultaneously in reaction to the drastic changes occurring in the country at the time.

[13] A major theme of the movement is the combination of artists' indigenous cultures with a Papua New Guinea's recently-attained statehood, modernization, and worldwide technological advance.