Yakety Yap: Re-Creations Speak of Island Tradition

SANTA ANA — Any number of exhibitions at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana have led to the same conclusion: Sources for authentic ethnic sacred artifacts the world over are shrinking.

Except in Yap.

Yep, Yap.

An exhibit, "Calling Island Spirits: An Introduction to the Sacred Arts of Micronesia," focusing on Yap and nearby islands, opened at the museum this week. Twenty historic artifacts and ethnographic photographs borrowed from UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History and the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History are being displayed alongside several contemporary "re-creations" made at the Ethnic Art Institute of Micronesia (EAIM).

The institute was established on Yap two years ago by the Robert Gumbiner Foundation for the Arts, which is based in Long Beach. To make those re-creations (not knockoffs or reproductions, mind you), Gumbiner's no sap: He taps the youth of Yap.

"Reproductions you take to a factory and produce in a synthetic material that simulates the original," explains Cynthia MacMullin, the foundation's director of collections and exhibitions. "We're actually teaching native local artists to make these objects in the [manner and] spirit in which they originally were made and used."

The exhibit, on display through Aug. 15, was organized by the Gumbiner Foundation (the same organization that recently hired away Bowers' director of development and programming, Pat House, to be CEO at a proposed Hippodrome Center for Art of the Americas in Long Beach).

And just where on the map is Yap?

Micronesia is roughly bordered by New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan and Hawaii and consists of more than 2,500 islands grouped in four archipelagoes: the Marshall, Gilbert, Caroline and Mariana Islands. Yap, considered Micronesia's most traditional sector, is in the Western Carolines.

A betel nut reception at the Bowers on Thursday was the first of several related events, all free.

Saturday, a three-hour symposium will include lectures, films (including a 1909 expedition documentary showing the tapuanu mask dance in the Mortlock Islands of Truk) and live Micronesian dance. Among the speakers: institute director Don Evans; art historian Jerome Feldman of Hawaii Pacific University; researcher Donald Rubinstein of the University of Guam; filmmaker Eric Metzgar; and Vitus Foneg, EAIM program coordinator and Yapese royal family scion.