Necklace (Lei Niho Palaoa)

This necklace, or lei niho palaoa, is made of hundreds of tiny braids of human hair. Acquired in the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii, it therefore falls under both the 1970 UNESCO Convention and NAGPRA. The start of its journey around the world is narrated on the carte de visite of one of its owners, a Miss Ayling, which was originally attached to the necklace. Recounting the acquisition by her ancestor, Thomas Ayling, the carte also paraphrases a section from the book Around the World in the Yacht Sunbeam by Mrs. Brassey, an account of the first private around-the-world journey taken by the author and her husband in 1876– 1877. In the book, Mrs. Brassey describes what she calls a paloola, the word exactly transcribed by Miss Ayling on the carte. Because there is no date on the carte, and Miss Ayling is not known, finding this copied passage helps in the dating of her ownership of the object.Amazingly, the necklace found itself back in Hawaii in the collection of Dr. Kiyoshi Hosoi, who graduated from Cornell Medical School in 1924 and went on to become a renowned physician. After his death, it passed through several collections via Sotheby’s auction house in New York, and was purchased from a gallery in 2010 for the Johnson Museum’s collection. (“This is no Less Curious: Journeys through the Collection” cocurated by Sonja Gandert, Alexandra Palmer, and Alana Ryder and presented at the Johnson Museum January 24 – April 12, 2015)