Post #409251 by Robb Hamel on Mon, Sep 22, 2008 8:12 AM

Hello Patro Zero,

I'm having a similar problem. I've seen Americanized images of what I've been told are some of the rare, real Tikis, but cannot find pictures of the real ones anywhere. As a Tiki artist, I'm interested in a catalog of real and invented Tikis - the best I've found is Miguel Covarrubias' maps (The Book of Tiki), or Crazy Al Evans mind-blowingly cool chess set (Tiki Art Now, pg 24).

As far as cataloging the names of the real ones, the major deities would be fairly easy - esp. Hawaiian - but many other cultures carved images of ancestors belonging to individual families, heroes from their mythology, or one of the nearly infinite spirits they recognized - and most of those are just dorky-looking carvings of regular people whose names have since been forgotten.

The best I've found so far is "Oceania: art of the pacific islands in the metropolitan museum of art." The book throws a lot of names around, but is probably not the catalog you're looking for. Basement Kahuna has a very admirable dedication to real native carvings - I wonder if he knows of a single source for this type of info?

It's difficult to believe that someone hasn't gathered this information together. A catalog of real (?!) and imagined Tikis... I think there is a great book that still hasn't been written.