Founded in 2009, the Department of Indo-Pacific Art is the newest department at the Gallery. The founding collections hold about 1,700 objects and have three areas of strength: ethnographic sculpture, Javanese gold from the prehistoric to the late medieval period, and Indonesian textiles. Highlights of the collection include a group of ethnographic carvings—ancestral sculpture, ceremonial objects, and architectural components from Indonesia, the Philippines, the aborigines of Taiwan, and mainland Southeast Asia—from the collection of Thomas Jaffe, B.A. 1971, who also endowed the department’s Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art. 

The earliest materials in the department’s holdings are a collection of approximately 500 gold objects—coins, jewelry, statues, and ritual objects—from Central and East Java. Donated to the Gallery by Hunter and Valerie Thompson, the objects date mainly from the eighth to the thirteenth century but also include some prehistoric material.

The department also holds about 600 textiles from Indonesia, mainly collected by Robert Holmgren and Anita Spertus. This collection is of exceptional quality and ranks among the finest in any museum. Its particular strength is textiles from South Sumatra, and it includes rare and unique weavings from Sulawesi and Lombok that reflect the history of Indonesian designs.

		Ruth Barnes ruth.barnes@yale.edu Ruth Barnes is the inaugural Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art. She received her D.Phil. from Oxford University and was previously textile curator at the Ashmolean Museum, where she organized exhibitions on Asian and Islamic textiles, early Indian Ocean trade, and pilgrimage. Her publications include The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera and Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Download curriculum vitae.

Barbier, Jean Paul, and Douglas Newton. Islands and Ancestors: Indigenous Styles of Southeast Asia. New York: Metropolital Museum of Art, 1988.

Barnes, Ruth, and Mary Kahlenberg, eds. Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles. New York: Prestel, 2010.

Holmgren, Robert J., and Anita E. Spertus. Early Indonesian Textiles from Three Island Cultures. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989.

Miksic, John. Old Javanese Gold: The Hunter Thompson Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2011.