Professor, O Cavalheiro Anthony Alan Shelton
BA (Hull), MLitt (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon), FCMA
Temporary Exhibitons
Heaven and Hell and Somewhere in Between. Portuguese Popular Art.
UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, 2015
Que Viva la Vida
UBC Museum of Anthropology
Vancouver, 2020
An installation of the Museum’s collection of Mexican trees of life by artists, Aurelio Flores and Javier Ramirez Martinez. A tribute to resilience and the importance of hope in the time of the pandemic.
From Carnival to Lucha Libre. Mexican Masks and Devotions
Museu de Lisboa, Palácio Pimenta, Pavalhão Preto,
2017, Lisbon (Portugal)
Part of the programme commemorating Lisbon as capital of Ibero-American art and culture, the exhibition was divided into seven rooms that presented 350 Mexican masks, film posters, and related items. Galleries focused on Tlaxcalan Carnival masks, devil masks, tiger masks, ceremonial masks, invented masks, masks used in wrestling (lucha libre) and Mexican masked super-heroes, a popular movie genre in the 1960s-1980s. The gallery on lucha libre included a wrestling ring which was used for matches.
Heaven and Hell and Somewhere in Between. Portuguese Popular Art.
Portuguese Popular Art. An exhibition on the fragmentary persistence of Portugal’s rusticated national identity, as it was constructed under the Salazar dictatorship, the estado novo. The exhibition looks at different facets of popular culture and links the recollections of living artists with historical discourses and 350 popular art works in the museum’s collection.
UBC Museum of Anthropology
Vancouver, 2015
Luminescense. The Silver of Peru
UBC Museum of Anthropology and University of Toronto Gallery
Vancouver & Toronto, 2013-2014
Andean ideas about divinity have long been expressed through materials like silver and gold. The metals were strongly associated with women and men, associated with the moon and sun and monopolized by royalty and nobility. The exhibition explains it was not the raw materials that Indigenous peoples valued, but their reflective qualities and association with light. The exhibition ….Examines the persistence of the category of light, reflection and sheen and their symbolic expression and significance in pre-Hispanic rulership ceremonies; the painting styles of the sixteenth to eighteenth century Cuzco and Potosí schools, contemporary Indigenous ritual regalia, and in the work of modern Peruvian silversmiths.
Godfried Donkor. Wallpaper: Whose Africa.
Horniman Museum and Gardens
London, 2000
Focusing on the British Punitive expedition of 1897, and the looted Benin bronzes in the Horniman’s collection, this Ghanian artist made wallpaper print from the images of imperial events occurring the same year. The wallpaper was then used to cover parts of the gallery walls in the African Worlds exhibition.
Osi Audu. The Moon is the Eye of the Sky.
Horniman Museum and Gardens
London, 2000
Audu’s work expresses traditional Yoruba ontologies, like that pertaining to the inner and outer head through contemporary styles and techniques of abstract painting, drawing and mixed media work. The exhibition explores the relationship between genre, technique and meaning.
The Chameleon Body. Photographs by Nicholas Sinclair.
Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton 1996.
An exhibition of black and white portraits taken by the distinguished photographer, Nicholas Sinclair in fetish clubs in Brighton, London and Berlin.
Fetishism. Visualizing Art and Desire.
South Bank Touring Exhibitions with venues at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton, The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich, and the Castle Museum and Art Gallery
Nottingham, 1995-1996.
A de-constructivist exhibition, divided between three galleries that mapped the different meanings and usages attributed to the category of the fetish in 1, Nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses on African religion; 2, in early 20th-century psychiatry, and 3, in late-twentieth-century commodity production, consumption and club culture. The exhibition included Kongo sculptures, surrealist and found objects and works by contemporary international artists.
Kinyozi. The Art of African Hairstyles.
Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton. 1994.
An exhibition of Kenyan barbers signs and paintings and drawings of hair styles, showing the influence of Western fashion and values on East African urban centres.
Peep. Sonia Boyce.
Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton. 1995.
An intervention in the World Cultures Gallery, where the artist cut-out the shadows thrown by the objects on exhibition onto large sheets of translucent paper that covered the fronts of the exhibition cases. The cut-outs, thrown at oblique angles to prevent direct visibility of the objects, forced visitors to bend, crouch and crane their bodies in order to see the collection, thus confronting visitors not with the spectacle of “otherness” but with the process of the Western voyeuristic gaze.
Hold. Recent Works by Shirley Chubb.
Inspired by Eduardo Paolozzi’s Lost Magic Kingdoms exhibition, the Museum commissioned the artist Shirley Chubb to make a series of works that were combined with colonially imprinted objects chosen from the collection to explicate the effects of colonialism and transnational corporations on the lives of African peoples.
Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton. 1995.
Exotics. North American Indigenous Cultures and Europeans.
An exhibition that compared Indigenous NWC representations of Europeans with Western photographic images of the Coast’s Indigenous peoples to raise questions on the construction of racial stereotypes. The “exotics” referred to here were Europeans.
Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery, and Museums
Brighton, 1991
Epic Dream Satire. Puppet Theatre.
Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery, and Museums
Brighton, 1991
An exhibition of 230 puppets drawn from collections around the United Kingdom. The exhibition showed many marionettes as they would have been hung behind their stages ready to be performed. The displays focused on back of stage techniques, including a large glass tank of water over which the long horizontal sticks used to manipulate water puppets were suspended, and different genres of stories, including glove puppets of Chamberlain and Hitler used in satirical plays during the War years. The exhibition gave rise to the annual Brighton Puppet Festival.
Treasures of the British Museum. Mexico and South America.
1990-1991
The first major touring exhibition of the Museum’s greatest treasures hosted at the Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), National Museum of Ethnology (Osaka) and the Prefectural Museum (Yamaguchi). I selected and wrote text for 80 works drawn from the Mexican and South American collections.
Bolivian Worlds. Art and world View of an Andean Mining Community.
Museum of Mankind (British Museum) 1987.
Using over 350 items, the exhibition interpreted Oruro’s spectacular Carnival and especially beliefs about the devil’s powers over minerals and miners, the diablada dance and masquerades, and his opposition to the Virgin of Socavon, as an expression of the “culture of insecurity”.
Casas Grandes.
Museum of Mankind (British Museum) 1986
This was the first exhibition of the Museum’s collection of pre-Hispanic Casas Grandes pottery, including the sublime mujer dormida (sleeping woman). The exhibition introduced the archaeology of Casas Grandes and explained its relationship to other sites in the American Southwest, before focusing on the symbolism of the forms and patterns painted onto the pottery.An exhibition of the Museum’s collection of pre-Hispanic Casas Grandes pottery.
Faces of Heaven, Faces of Earth. Mexican Masks.
An exhibition comparing 60 ceremonial and commercial masks and the different sources of creativity behind them. This, the first exhibition I curated, included sixty ceremonial and commercial masks that I collected in Mexico during fieldwork between 1980-1984. The exhibition compared the different sources of creativity behind used ceremonial masks and the much more elaborate market-oriented masks. It traced the iconography of the more recently ‘invented’ masks to a re-reading of written and pictural sources on pre-Columbian art and religious thought.
Wolfson College, Oxford.
