Museum Hosting Amazon Exhibit: EKU Professor Has Collected Artifacts During Trips
By Leigh Ann Tipton, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.
Apr. 2–As Joe Molinaro talked, larger than life photos of faces and places in Ecuador flashed across a large screen to his left.
Molinaro, an arts and ceramics professor at Eastern Kentucky University, has spent much of his lifetime studying the indigenous people who live in the country’s Amazon forests, and he has the artifacts and photos to prove it.
The various vessels, necklaces and pottery he collected in more than 30 years’ worth of visits to the Amazon are on display at the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art through May 20. Previously, the artifacts were on display in Molinaro’s home.
“We love living with these artifacts,” he said.
Sunday, Molinaro officially opened the exhibit “Tribal Art of the Amazon” with a presentation on the people and culture he has studied and hopes to preserve.
As Molinaro showed photos of people and of some of the pieces in his collection, he talked about the various threats to the indigenous cultures of the Amazon.
There are a number of outside influences changing the landscape and culture, the most influential being the lumber and oil industries, tourism and missionaries.
“If we really care about Amazonia and want to preserve it, we should all leave, myself included,” he said.
Molinaro has a fascination with the differing forms and decoration of pottery made by the people who live in the Amazon rain forest. He spent almost 15 years trying to learn the inspiration for one particular design — a pattern of diamond-shapes laid on their side.
When he finally found the answer, it surprised and amazed him. A woman took a leaf, folded it again and again into a small rectangle, and then bit down on all four sides. When she opened the leaf back up, the folding and bite marks had created the same diamond-shaped design painted onto the tribe’s pottery.
The more elaborate forms of pottery in the display are in the images of the moon, dragons and other creatures in the mythology of the Kichwa tribe.
“They’ve deliberately taken their mythology and tried to give it form through ceramics,” he said. But for the most part, the pottery of Amazonia tribes is utilitarian in nature.
The growing availability of metal and plastic containers in the Amazon is causing many tribal women to abandon pottery making. Molinaro said he’s created an awkward solution — paying some artisans $20 a month to continue creating pottery.
He and his wife, Mary, have supported the continued creation of tribal art in this way. He said friends have now joined in his efforts to preserve the pottery of Amazonia. Molinaro often makes trips to Ecuador to continue his study of tribal pottery and the women who create it.
“Those women whom he visits are in a struggle to hold onto traditions, hold onto property and hold onto their culture,” said Steve Driver, a Brescia art and ceramics instructor who helped secure the tribal art exhibit. Driver has also been to Ecuador and is currently the chairman of Kentucky Partners for the Americas, an exchange program between the bluegrass state and Ecuador. Driver has accompanied Molinaro on at least one trip and learned a lot about tribal art in the process. He said he is now working on his own interpretation of a tribal “mucawa” — a vessel used to hold a fermented Yucca-based beverage.
“I don’t want to copy it,” he said. “But I’m not going to understand why people make it unless I make it myself.”
The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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