Tobias Schneebaum
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Tobias Schneebaum (March 25, 1922 – September 20, 2005) was a celebrated artist and AIDS activist. He was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side and grew up in Brooklyn. He earned a Master of Arts in anthropology at The New School in New York. He is best known for his travels among peoples of Peru and Papua (western New Guinea -- then known as Irian Jaya, and a part of Indonesia), which were documented in the film Keep the River on Your Right.
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[edit] History
- 1939: Graduated from Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious free NYC public school that has produced many Nobel prize winners
- 1943?: Graduated City College of New York; majored in mathematics and art
- mid 1940s, Served as a U.S. Army radar repairman during World War II
- 1946: Studied painting with Rufino Tamayo at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
- 1947 to 1950: Lived and painted in Mexico - first lived among natives the Lakadone Indians
- 1955: Won a Fulbright fellowship to travel to Peru (he hitchhiked from New York to Peru)
- lived with the Harakumbut people, at the time called the Amarakaire, during which time he famously claimed to have participated in cannibalism.
- 1955 to 1970, Designer at Tiber Press
- 1973: Traveled to Irian Jaya (Papua, western New Guinea), Indonesia and lived with and among the Asmat people on the southwestern coast
- 1995: Traveled to see the Asmat people in western New Guinea
- 1999: Traveled back to Peru with a documentary crew after 45 years, also back to the Asmat region of Irian Jaya where he came upon his former lover Aipit
- 2005: Died in Great Neck, NY - at a hospital near his nephews and sister-in-law, although his home remained Westbeth, a well-known artists' complex in Greenwich Village, NYC that has also been home to many well-known artists like Merce Cunningham and Diane Arbus.
[edit] Bibliography
note: Schneebaum illustrated the 1959 rhyming children's book Jungle Journey by well-known poet Mary Britton Miller - first "book" version of his disappearance in Peruvian Amazon. He had told the story to Miller.
- Keep the River on Your Right (1969)
- Wild Man (1979)
- Asmat: Life with the Ancestors (1981)
- Asmat Images: The Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress (1985)
- Where the Spirits Dwell: An Odyssey in the Jungle of New Guinea (1989)
- Embodied Spirits: Ritual Carvings of the Asmat (1990)
- Secret Places: My Life in New York & New Guinea (2000)
- He also was a contributor to People of the River, People of the Tree: Change & Continuity in Sepik & Asmat Art (1989)
- Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, documentary directed by brother and sister David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro - won a 2001 Independent Spirit Award (2000) [1]
The beneficiary of his renowned Asmat shield collection is the Metropolitan Museum of New York
