Massim Museum

The Massim Museum and Cultural Centre will open on Friday 4 November this year in association with the National Kanu and Kundu Festival, in Alotau the capitol of Milne Bay Province, PNG.
It took the very successful Malinowski Legacy Conference in 2015 to regain the impetus to establish this Museum, this year.
The Massim Museum is at Education Milne Bay's Wanigili Centre, in a large wooden building reputed to be the largest wooden structure in the South West Pacific. Co-resident with the Museum is a cafe, conference venue, accommodation and the very successful Egwalau Tours and Events. EMB, as it is known, has a unique charm on the site of fierce fighting during WW2 and close to peaceful Milne Bay.
For the last six months The Director, an experienced Pacific Islands curator Joan Winter, has been working with a diverse range of local men and women from all over the Province and international scholars on the seven exhibitions to open the Museum covering a diversity of forms- history, carving, weaving, contemporary art, community photography and more. Much of this work has been done voluntarily, as the entrance honour board will indicate.
The museum's permanent collection started with the very impressive 40 carvings and 12 story boards from the Malinowski Legacy forum carving project as part of the Anniversary conference in 2015. Since then the Museum has acquired over 50 further objects for its permanent collection, some as donations, which will also be on display at the opening. Some people in Milne Bay Province MBP have already understood that a museum keeps precious objects safe and so have offered their cultural heritage in a community spirit of sharing. A reference library has also been started with much interest from the book starved public. Building workers have spent their lunch times reading and viewing from this library, again developing mainly through donations.
The second year for the Museum will be able to provide an outreach program for the many village dwellers, with a special community engagement and knowledge sharing and access program, with the help of external funding. This will include the development of a film, photographic and text based media archive at the disposal of our peoples living here.
Our programs will be representative, inclusive and balanced, over a three-year period, to include all our diverse cultures from inland, mountain communities to scattered small islands.
Our exhibitions and other programs must be in partnership and collaboration with what else is developing in the province such as educational initiatives, contemporary artists and artisans, and the nationally designated Tourism hub that Milne Bay is. In preserving the old and the threatened we will also promote the transitional and the new.
The Massim Museum has three galleries, including a flexible multipurpose exhibition, screen and performance space and an artefact and souvenir shop. The first exhibitions will include the central feature: a Kiriwina Island wood carvers double exhibition of storyboards telling the mythopoetic cautionary tale of Imdeduya based on the Kula Ring, and 40 statuettes based on Trobriand Islands cultural heroes, villains, ancestors, everyday and ceremonial life. Smaller exhibitions include: one of the few named 19th century carvers, Mutuaga from the Suau region assisted by Dr. Harry Beran, and the artefacts of the permanent collection. The two opening history exhibitions are: The Rise and Fall of Samarai, and Milne Bay's place in World War Two, The Battle of Milne Bay 1942. More contemporary displays include Milne Bay artists painting exhibition and WWOMB Women Weavers of Milne Bay including traditional and contemporary objects and fashion statements. The fun photographic show 1001 Faces of Milne Bay takes in images from the 1980s to today of all our people