Faces at the Peabody Essex Museum

Hi everyone. It's already Friday again. Happy end of another week to you. 

Last week  as many of you already know I visited the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. I've visited the museum several times before, but always for special exhibits. This time I actually visited most of the rest of the museum, which has quite an eclectic mix of art. And I'm with you who commented yesterday that making the flags out of human hair could make you a little bit uncomfortable. It did me, but it certainly makes a statement.

Today for Nicole's Friday Face Off I will share some faces from the museum with you.

And I am also linking up to Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

I'll start my eclectic mix of faces with these screech owls. These birds  were in a small section of the museum that had some animal art as well as a wall of OLD taxidermied birds. 

And these next 2 faces in this Chinese sculpture were part of the animal art in that room.

And here's an interesting war club, with the story about it in the photo that follows it.

Here's a mask and

an Indian protector goddess.

And I believe this next photo  shows a Chinese Foo Dog statue. There were actually 2 of these, and Chinese Food dogs are  put up in pairs. One would be male and one female. I've read that the female is the yin and symbolically protects the people in the house and the male is the yang. He protects the house structure itself.

The Peabody Essex is in Salem, Massachusetts. That city is famous for its 1692 Witch Trials, which were horrible events because 25 men, women and children died. This city is also famous for being the home of the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote the novel The Scarlet Letter back in the early 1800's.  If you're not familiar with this American literary classic, it is set back in the early days of Salem when the Puritans ruled the roost. Because a young woman had a child out of wedlock, she had to wear a red letter A. The A stood for adulteress. This next painting shows an artist's take on this novel. (And I didn't get the artist's name :(  either.)

And here's a portrait of the young author.

Salem was once one of the richest cities in the early United States because it was the home of spice and Asian Trading. Ships home based in Salem would sail to Asia bringing back some of the spices Americans craved. These ships would also bring back artifacts from Asia also. That is one of the reasons there are so many Asian artifacts in the Peabody Essex Museum.

Because of this connection to Asia, the museum has a complete Chinese house that they brought over and reassembled. It is called the Yin Yu Tang house, and it was the family home of a prosperous Chinese merchant family named Huang. The house was in the Huang family for more than 200 years before it was brought to Salem in 1982. 

Many of the artifacts in this house also belonged to the family. I'll do a house post another time, but there were a couple of faces to share so I'll do that today.

The first one is from post-World War 2 China. You probably recognize Chairman Mao. Everyone was required to have pictures of him put up in their homes.

And in one other room there were these early fashion pictures.

And that's all my faces for this week.

Have a wonderful end of the week and weekend. Thanks for visiting my blog too.