Tobias Schneebaum - Biography

Tobias Schneebaum (March 25, 1922 – September 20, 2005) was an American artist, anthropologist, and AIDS activist. He is best known for his experiences living, and traveling among the Harakmbut people of Peru, and the Asmat people of Papua, Western New Guinea, Indonesia then known as Irian Jaya.

Early life

He was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side and grew up in Brooklyn. In 1939 he graduated from the Stuyvesant High School, moving on to the City College of New York, graduating in 1943 after having majored in mathematics and art. During World War II he served as a radar repairman in the U.S. Army.

Travels

In 1947, after briefly studying painting with Rufino Tamayo at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Schneebaum went to live and paint in Mexico for three years, living among the Lakadone tribe. In 1955 he won a Fulbright fellowship to travel and paint in Peru. After hitch-hiking from New York to Peru, he lived with the Harakmbut people for seven months, where he slept with his male subjects and claimed to have joined the tribe in cannibalism on one occasion.

Until 1970 he was the designer at Tiber Press, then in 1973 he embarked on his third overseas trip, to Irian Jaya in South East Asia, living with the Asmat people on the south-western coast. He helped establish the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress. Schneebaum would return there in 1995 to revisit a former lover, named Aipit. He recounted his journey into the jungles of Peru in the 1961 memoir Keep the River on Your Right. In 1999, he revisited both Irian Jaya and Peru for a documentary film, also titled Keep the River on Your Right.

Later life

Schneebaum spent the final years of his life in Westbeth Artists Community, an artists' commune in Greenwich Village, New York City, also home to Merce Cunningham and Diane Arbus, and died in 2005 in Great Neck, New York. He bequeathed his renowned Asmat shield collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and his personal papers are preserved within the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies.

Awards

Schneebaum received a Master of Arts in anthropology at The New School in New York City, and another from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont.

Bibliography

• Schneebaum illustrated the 1959 rhyming children's book Jungle Journey by well-known poet Mary Britton Miller, which was the first "book" version of his disappearance in the 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 (and fellow Stuyvesant alumni) David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro - won a 2001 Independent Spirit Award (2000)

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External links

• NPR: 6min audio clip on Schneebaum's life
• Union Tribune Article on Tobias Schneebaum
• New York Times obituary