The Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets at Yale University Art Gallery
The Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets
The Yale University Art Gallery's Indo-Pacific collection of wayang puppets and related materials, "the largest of its kind in the world," is anchored by "more than 125 complete sets (a total of 20,000 puppets) from Java, Bali, Madura, and Lombok". These sets make possible the performance of repertoires from the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics and narratives from local traditions, Islamic and Chinese tales. This vast assemblage was gathered over decades by Swiss primatologist Dr. Walter Angst and, after he died in 2014, donated to the Yale Indo Pacific Gallery Department in 2017 by his brother, Sir Henry Angest.
The monumental task of cataloging and curating such a massive collection has been undertaken by Dr. Ruth Barnes, the inaugural Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, in collaboration with the specialized expertise of Dr. Matthew Isaac Cohen, who "joined the Yale Gallery from September to December of 2017, as a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Indo-Pacific department, working with Dr. Barnes to study and curate the collection, and returned to Yale in 2018-19 as a Fellow at the Institute of Sacred Music. Professor Cohen studied wayang kulit in the puppetry department of the Conservatoire Institut Seni Indonesia Surakarta in Indonesia, received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University, was a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in The Netherlands and taught at the University of Glasgow before becoming Professor of International Theater, Royal Holloway, University of London in 2005, and Director of Royal Holloway's Centre for Asian Theatre and Dance. In Fall 2019, Professor Cohen returned to Connecticut as a Professor in the School of Fine Arts, Department of Dramatic Arts, University of Connecticut, and joined Yale as an Affiliate of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies."
In November of 2018, Yale hosted Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, the Sultan of Yogyakarta, at a celebration of the collection's donation. The intention of the Gallery is to "spark dialogue not only within the museum but among colleagues at Yale and other scholarly institutions. It is also planned to establish links with Indonesian academic and cultural centers interested in the collection and its relevance to their heritage."
Here, Art of the Ancestors presents a small selection of well-imaged and lovely Javanese wayang kulit puppets from the 1913 set "Kyai Nugroho" and several old flat carved wooden wayang klitik puppets.
