Body Arts - Body Painting
Papua New Guinea
Photograph of Wulamb, by Mike O’ Hanlon,
Papua New Guinea;1979
The photograph (right) shows Wulamb, a Wahgi woman, being decorated for the
presentation of her bridewealth. Among the Wahgi, and many other people of
Papua New Guinea, an exchange of gifts takes place on marriage, the bride’s
side giving more than they receive. Relatives of both bride and groom often
decorate themselves elaborately on such occasions.
Wulamb wears a headdress of red parrot plumes, with cassowary feathers behind.
The sheet in which her body is draped is to protect her finery from the powdery
red face paint. However, there is no specific meaning to the design being
painted on Wulamb’s face, or to the colour red. Instead, what is significant
for the Wahgi is whether the skin looks glossy, since this is an indication
of ancestral favour and fortune. The weather at a wedding is also felt to
be significant. As Wulamb was being decorated, her relatives were discussing
whether it might rain.
North America
On display in the Museum are many samples of body-painting pigments from
North America. These were collected in 1911 and 1912 by Barbara Freire-Marreco
in New Mexico and Arizona.
Pigment, USA; 1911.86.4
Pigment, USA; 1911.86.3
Pigment, USA; 1913.87.92
On her return to Oxford she wrote the following in the Museum’s accession book:
The performers in a dance are…elaborately painted. For instance, at the
Pogon Jari of Feb. 9 1911, Casimiro Tafoya had his face evenly coloured with
yellow…and a design of arrows on lightning in red running upwards 
from each
cheek to the middle of his forehead. Other boys had blue spots and stars
on cheeks, forehead and chin, or blue lines on cheekbones. The bodies and
limbs of the dancers are also coloured. At the buffalo-dance at Santa Clara,
Jan. 6. 1911, the men were painted dark grey with river mud, their legs above
the knee and their bodies below the waist being painted white, so that a
little white showed above and below their kilts, and their hands also white.
They had white ‘stars’…on their backs, shoulders and arms, representing the
star which belongs to ‘the governor of the buffaloes’.…The two performers
in a Handkerchief Dance at Nambe, Sept. 1910, were painted in red and white
and green and white respectively…a most effective disguise.…Women dancers
have a large red spot painted on each cheekbone. At the end of a dance, the
male performers run down to the river to swim and wash off their paint. The
women wash in their houses.…In summer, many Indians have a band of black
paint diagonally across the chest; they do not wash it off until the summer
rains have come.…One of them, a K’osa, also painted his face with black rain-drops...
Further Resources
Body Art Collections at the Pitt Rivers: A website exploring the Body Art collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Here you can find out more about the objects on display in the Museum, about the themes of the displays, and about the people who made and used the objects.
Objects featured in this introductory guide can be found in the following cases:
First Floor (Lower Gallery) L47B for pigments from the USA First Floor (Lower Gallery) L48B for photograph of Wulamb
Introductory guide compiled by: Jennifer Peck, Project Assistant, DCF Redisplay Project, 2002
Introductory guide revised by: Bryony Reid, Senior Project Assistant (Interpretation), DCF What’s Upstairs?, October 2005
Download pdf version of
this introductory guide
