Tobias Schneebaum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since September 2005. |
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 City. He is best known for his experiences living, and traveling among the Arakmbut people of Peru, then known as the Amarakaeri, and the Asmat people of Papua, Western New Guinea, Indonesia then known as Irian Jaya. He recounted his journey into the jungles of Peru in the memoir Keep the River on Your Right ISBN 978-0802131331. In 1999, he revisited both Asmat and Peru for the documentary film Keep the River on Your Right. He bequeathed his renowned Asmat shield collection is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Contents |
[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 an indigenous people, the Lakadone Indians
- 1955: Won a Fulbright fellowship to travel to Peru. He hitchhiked from New York to Peru. He lived with the Arakmbut whom he famously claimed to have joined 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
- 1977: Received a master's in cultural anthropology from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont.
- 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 film directed by brother and sister David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro - won a 2001 Independent Spirit Award (2000) [1]
