Pacific art, artifacts to be made available to teachers, students

High quality Pacific art and artifacts will soon be available to educators in three U.S.-affiliated island nations.

Arts councils in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam are working with Pacific Resources for Education and Learning to prepare lending boxes of art and artifacts for use by teachers, artists, museum educators, and council staff.

Palauan storyboards, Samoan fly whisks, and Pohnpeian dance paddles are among the items educators will share with interested students and community members.

Each box has three separate layers of art and artifacts representing Micronesian, Melanesian, and Polynesian cultures.

The boxes also contain a variety of teacher resources. They include PRELs award-winning video Island Worlds: Art and Culture in the Pacific; PREL’s Art of the Pacific Islands CD-ROM; posters of the art shown in context; and books and maps.

The art in the lending boxes was donated and purchased through the arts councils, which will maintain and provide access to the boxes.

With the opportunity to examine and compare three types of Pacific art, viewers can gain a greater understanding of the differences and features held in common. The project also promotes the continuity of cultural traditions.

The American Samoa Council on Culture, Arts, and Humanities chose the name ola for their lending boxes because the word stands for both carrying basket and alive. By making the lending boxes widely available, the project will help make Pacific culture come alive for the viewers.

Free workshops on integrating arts instruction and inquiry-based instructional approaches will take place over the summer.

Workshops take place July 13 on Guam; July 14-15 on Rota; July 17 on Saipan; and July 21 in Palau.

For further information about the workshops in the CNMI, contact the Commonwealth Council for Arts and Culture at (670) 322-9982 or Dr. Lori Phillips, director of PREL’s Pacific Center for the Arts and Humanities in Education, at (808) 441-1340 or phillipl@prel.org.

The project is a collaboration between the American Samoa Council on Culture, Arts, and Humanities; the Commonwealth Council for Arts and Culture; the Guam Council on the Arts and Humanities Agency; and PREL. Funding for the project is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.