Arts Council In Guam Is

A Co-Operative Venture

The Insular Arts Council is a co-operative venture between the University of Guam and the community for the development of “music, visual arts, cultural heritage, literature and art educa tion by and for the people of Guam”. Part of the money for running costs comes from an American foundation and the other half from local sources.

The council sponsors everything from publications to art shows and TV programmes, and its range of activities has been widening since it was first founded in 1967. One of its recent activities was preparing a library of tape recordings of the music of Micronesia.

Three recent and attractive small publications by the Council are, Canoes of Micronesia, The Pacific Vision, and Charles Gibbons: visions of old Palau. Gibbons is a Palauan of Micro nesian, West Indian and English ancestry, now nearly 80 years old. His attractive little book of 40 pages gives a brief biography of the artist and reproduces some of his attractive pictures of Palauan life.

Months of painstaking labour will have gone into this bai or men's meeting house (above), the most ornamental of all Micronesian indigenous buildings. The gable ends as well as the interior tie beams were elaborately carved in low relief and painted with stones and legends of Palau. The paintings are reminiscent of the murals of the Book of the Dead found in the tombs of ancient Egypt. This is from a painting by Palauan artist Charles Gibbons (below left) in the University of Guam Gallery of Art.