Exhibiting Oceanic art

Nicholas Thomas is an anthropologist and historian, and since 2006 Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands, later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific itself. His academic and public writing and curatorial work includes collaborations with artists including painter John Pule and photographer Mark Adams on projects exploring cross-cultural art histories in the Pacific and curated exhibitions for many museums and art galleries in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He is currently a member of the Conseil d’orientation scientifique of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the International Advisory Board of the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin.

He most recently co-curated Oceania with Peter Brunt, which ambitiously brought together artists of Pacific heritage and 200 works from public and private UK and European collections, stretching across 400 years of cultural expression. The exhibition was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris in 2018-19.  Alongside this work he has authored and edited fifty influential books and exhibition catalogues, exploring the idea of art across Oceania, along with investigations of European travel, colonial histories, museology and the history of collections. His books have included Entangled Objects (1991), which influentially contributed to a revival of material culture studies, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (1999), a comparative postcolonial art history of Australia and New Zealand, Islanders: the Pacific in the age of empire (2012), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize, and Gauguin and Polynesia (2024), which offers a fresh view on the artist.