Bowers Museum: Ongoing Exhibits
The Bowers Museum is a museum located in Santa Ana, California, USA. It is known for its diverse collections, featuring art and artifacts from various cultures around the world.
The museum's collections span a wide range of cultures and time periods. Exhibits include items from Native American, Asian, African, Pacific Islander, and pre-Columbian civilizations. The museum's focus is on promoting a greater understanding and appreciation of world cultures.
Ongoing Exhibits
Miao: Masters of Silver
Gemstone Carvings: The Masterworks of Harold Van Pelt
California Bounty: Image and Identity 1850-1930
Spirits and Headhunters: Art of the Pacific Islands
First Californians
Ancient Arts of China: A 5000 Year Legacy
Ceramics of Western Mexico
California Legacies: Missions and Ranchos (1768-1848)
Miao: Masters of Silver
Featuring over 250 intricate works of silver, Miao: Masters of Silver features jewelry and textiles primarily made in China’s Guizhou Province, where the largest population of Miao people reside. Male silversmiths create a variety of ornaments through casting, smelting, repoussé (a reverse hammering technique), forging, engraving, knitting, coiling, cutting, and other methods. Concepts such as beauty, unity, fortune, and pride are expressed as visual abstractions and geometric motifs. - museum website
Gemstone Carvings: The Masterworks of Harold Van Pelt
For over 35 years Harold Van Pelt has quietly been perfecting the art of carving quartz, rock crystal and agate gemstones. Gemstone Carvings: Masterworks by Harold Van Pelt is a display of his mastery.
Each work in the exhibition is a reflection of hundreds of hours of craftsmanship. Van Pelt’s working of the stone down to paper-thin walls brings out the gorgeous natural quality and colors of agate and gives quartz the transparency of glass. Transformed by one man's vision and skill from a solid stone to an incredibly delicate work of art, the gemstone carvings of Harold Van Pelt have to be seen to be believed. The Bowers Museum is proud to welcome this collection back to Santa Ana, where it was first exhibited in 2010. - museum website
Spirits and Headhunters
Spanning the geographic region collectively referred to as Oceania, this comprehensive exhibition highlights masterworks from the three cultural regions of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Particular focus is placed on New Guinea, land of the headhunter, and the rich artistic traditions infused into daily and ritual life. Submerge into a visually stunning world and come face to face with larger-than-life masks, finely crafted feast bowls, objects associated with the secretive Sepik River men’s house, beautiful shell and feather currency, magic figures and tools of the shaman, objects related to seagoing trade routes, gorgeous personal adornments, weapons of warfare and the most precious of human trophies taken in retribution.
Watch this video taken by Bowers President Peter Keller on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea that features the Fire Dance Mask Festival. Several of the large spirit masks seen in this performance were collected on behalf of the museum and can be viewed in the Spirits and Headhunters exhibition. - museum website
Ancient Arts of China: A 5000 Year Legacy
Curated by scholars of Chinese history and culture from the Shanghai Museum, this incredible collection portrays the evolution of Chinese art and culture.
Journey back through 5000 years of Chinese history and follow the efflorescence of arts throughout one of the world's oldest living civilizations. From large painted ceramic pots used during the Neolithic period, to sculptures of camels and horses made at the height of the Silk Road, to beautiful embroidered silk court robes and ivory carvings from the 19th century, this exhibition presents the importance of fine art made to be admired during life and depended on in the afterlife. - museum website
California Bounty: Image and Identity, 1850-1930
California Bounty is the first curatorial interpretation of the museum’s distinguished painting collection since 1994. Viewers will take a rambling journey through California's visual history, a history shaped by a unique mixture of Mexican and Anglo traditions as well as the state’s position on the Pacific Rim. Each painting epitomizes California’s land, people and offerings as a place of produce and plenty. The exhibition brings together many of the museum’s most cherished paintings, including works by early artists documenting the Mission and Rancho periods; landscapes by plein air painters portraying California’s coasts and canyons; sumptuous portraits and still-life paintings of flowers and paper-wrapped fruit by Alberta and William McCloskey; and a small selection of works indicating California as a continued place of possibility. This will be the first public display of many of the selected paintings, some of which have spent years in storage. - museum website
Ceramics of Western Mexico
Encounter Pre-Columbian Art from the western Mexican states of Colima, Nayarit and Jalisco.
Visitors learn about West Mexican shaft tombs and the cultures who used this means of burying their dead. A selection of the ceramic figures placed inside shaft tombs to accompany the deceased in the afterlife are on display. The exhibition includes artworks that depict imagery from daily life, that show the intensity of West Mexican figurative work and that are naturalistic in form like the famously plump Colima dogs. - museum website
First Californians
This installation showcases the Bowers' extensive permanent collection of Native American art and artifacts in stone, shell, plant fiber (through spectacular basketry) and feathers.
These primary resources help tell the story of the culture of Native Californians. Although groups from all regions of California are represented in the exhibit, special attention is placed on local groups that inhabited the coastal regions of Southern California. The Boeing Company funded the teacher resources guide that accompanies this exhibit. This guide is available to teachers who schedule a tour. - museum website
Sacred Realms: Buddhist Paintings by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan from the Gayle and Edward P. Roski Collection
Recently reopened and updated!
The nine immense paintings shown in this exhibition are all the work of one extraordinary Buddhist monk named Shashi Dhoj Tulachan, a second generation thangka artist living in Tuksche, a remote village located in Mustang, Nepal's northernmost district adjacent to Tibet.
Shashi Dhoj Tulachan has devoted much of his life to the restoration of a nearby 16th century gompa (Tibetan monastery) known as the Chhairo Gompa.
The practice of thangka painting is centuries old and is an art carried out by highly trained monks for the purpose of teaching about Buddha and the tenets of the Buddhist religion. The overwhelming amount of detailed imagery in each painting includes deities, mythologies, and the use of repeated and abstracted design. For those seeking enlightenment, thangka paintings exist as objects of meditation.
The paintings in this collection are not thangkas in the traditional sense. Thangkas are usually much smaller and are rolled on canvas so that they can be easily transported and hung anywhere for teaching. The thangkas exhibited here are similar in size to mural paintings found in monasteries. These paintings also deviate from the rules for the creation of a thangka where the exact use of color, shape, proportion, characteristics and qualities of the imagery are all strictly regulated.
Shashi Dhoj Tulachan has painted this set of images by combining the traditional motifs of one of the foremost schools recognized by high-level monks in Tibet today, the Tibetan Karma Ghadri School, with images that are purely and cleverly of his imagination. The vibrant colors he used are made from natural mineral pigments. - museum website
California Legacies: Missions and Ranchos (1768-1848)
California Legacies: Missions and Ranchos (1768-1848) features displays of California and Orange County history that are must-sees for California students and residents alike.
California Legacies: Missions and Ranchos (1768-1848) features objects related to the settlement of Alta California through Spanish land grants, life at the California Missions and the wealth and lifestyles of the first families who flourished under Mexico's rule of California known as the Rancho period. The collection originating from Orange County's missions and ranchos includes the first brandy still to be brought to California, a statue of St. Anthony that originally stood in the Serra Chapel at Mission San Juan Capistrano, a dispatch pouch used by Native Americans to deliver messages between missions, and fine clothing, paintings and daily use objects. A must-see for California students and residents alike. - museum website
