WEAVING STORIES at AAM.  

Viewed the current exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, definitely worth a visit. WEAVING STORIES.  on view through May 2, 2022. Joan and M.Glenn Vinson, Jr gifts to the museum are  most appealling.  I was especially interested in the Indonesian textiles. It would have interested me to know when, why and where the collectors acquired their treasures. Women weaving was always linked to their skill and eligibility as a bride.  Sometimes, they even acquired shaman like status. Local organic plants were used such as banana(abaca) and pineapple leaves (pina)  fibers spun into threads.

Curated by Dr. Natasha Reichle, the Associate curator of SE Asian Art, the aluable threads and elaborate ornamentation with gold and silver, ikat and supplementary weft were only worn by royal women.  Textiles also respected different faiths serving as talismans or protective garments.  In a rare silk cepuk from Bali, spiky white triangles aong its borders symbolize the teeth of the guardian deity Barong.  the ikats invited the protection of the gods and ancestors.   

Textiles from a Sojourn in Azerbaijan

 Why we collect?  A position. in my case, A Fulbright  takes us to a place.  The clothing is a cultural value of the people, and in some cases, the cultural heritage.  Azerbaijan has been in the news as bloody wars along the border with Armenia continue...and erupt again, now quieted by a truce brokered again by the Russians.  When I was in Baku, I was invited to sit in on the international conference on the border of Herzogivina and the refugee camps that had been there for a decade, and now it is more than two decades later, and the animosities flare up, again, in a more deadly way.  Alkinov's son is in charge in Azerbaijan and not a respected leader as was his father.  Old style Soviet ways dominate and the country is very "tribal" in its relations.../ 

In front of the war memorial in Baku 

Women in front of the mosque in Baku 

Man in front of refugee camp 

 

Woman seller 

The eternal flame for those who died in the conflict, now risen again. 

My incarnation in Baku, walking the port to my residence 

The walkway between the center and my residence. Baku

A tower in Baku marking boundaries. 

Young colleagues from State Department Baku 

The president of Khazar University where I taught and key members of his staff at his home. 

Historical House director guiding me through heritage museum

Historic House Heritage Museum Baku 

Weavers of the fine rugs in Baku 

The Loom for weaving 

A mugham player major heritage project, the preservation of which was 
 directed by French Ambassador. 

 

Textile Arts Council (TAC) De Young Museum. "Shared Passions" meeting

Pencil Carriers in the Azeri book. 

My pencil carrier (Azeri)

 I participated, and these zoom meetings are becoming lively.  I chose Azerbaijan, and my timing was perfect, given the state has occupied the news all week long, repeating the conflict, for which there was a cease fire, when I had my Fulbright in Azerbaijan. 

I chose a simple theme: small bags and displayed one from Azerbaijan and one from the Republic of Georgia.  The former was a noble bag, actually used for carrying tobacco? and the latter was a bag made by the monasteries in Georgia just outside Tibilisi.  

The Azeri bag is silk and embroidered with silk thread.  The Georgian bag is wool and cotton and also embroidered. 

Georgian bag (Monastery)

Georgian bag (monastery) 

Azeri  bag  19th -early 20th c. 

.  

 

Azeri toggle on bag for carrying tobacco 

My elegant tobacco silk bag Azerbaijan 

bags in Azerbaijan catalogue book 

Hannah Ryggen Woven Manifestos A Textile Artist in Norway. At BAMPFA, November 18-February 28, 2021.

 

Hannah Ryggen's home is Trondheim, Norway.   I saw the beautiful collection of her textile works at the local design museum, the Kuntsmuseum.. My Norwegian friend in Oslo  from the Ibsen world recommended it to me.  The trip evolved as I was on pilgrimage to NIDAROS,  the great cathedral which is a World Heritage site, built by the first Viking King Olaf, who  converted to Christianity, and is now honored as a sait.  I  stayed in its Pilgrim Guest House.  Built by the first Viking to convert to Christianity

The trip to Trondheim  introduced me to an textile artist who has been in the Venice Bienelle and in Documenta and at the Kunshalle in Frankfurt, and will be at Bampfa in 2020-21 curated by former Director and Senior Curator Lawrence Rinder.  We discussed her work in a Curator's Circle talk this summer. Larry had been prompted by a member poet, Bob Gluck,  who had lived in Norway for a couple of years to look at Ryggen's  master works, because they are so valued in Norway and Europe. I was able to obtain the only book in the bookstore at Bampfa before it closed, which is published by Prestel and is a beautiful collection exhibited at the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. I also had bought the catalogue at the museum in Trondheim, Hannah Ryggen Triennale 2016 "We Live upon a Star".  

An excerpt from  the dialogue in "An Accidental Modernist" Ingar Dragset in Conversation with Esther Schlicht. 

ES Ryggen's major tapestry "We are Living on a Star" has been installed in the Highrise in the Government Quarter in Oslo ever since its creation in 1958 but it was damaged in the terrorist bombing by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011.  The work has been repaired but the damage is still visible.  How do you read this scar or wound? 

ID  Of course Ryggen would have been absolutely appalled by the view of Breivik, as we all are.  But she was also someone who didn't seem to brush uncomfortable truths lightly. The scars in "We are Living on a Star" will never heal, just as the scars that Breivik has inflicted upon the world won't heal, and they shouldn't.  We need to remember what is able to hurt us, what lies dormant in our midst. "

This tapestry, Hannah Ryggen said, is to remind us that "love and compassion" are important for government officials.   Ryggen lived through the Nazi occupation of Norway.  

Ryggen raised the sheep on their farm, for the wool, and grew the flax, for the linen.  She spun and dyed her own threads, from gathering lichen and bark for dyes.  Hannah, in her education, started as a painter, studying at Lund University.  She felt the warp and woof of weaving offered an implicit grid to structure her images, in a middle ground between schematic abstraction and narrative figuration.  Like a painter, she wove directly from her imagination to the textile canvas. She did no preliminary drawings but wove as she wanted, using a direct method.  She hung the tapestries on her clothes line. Hannah Ryggen was weaving art, not practicing the art of weaving, alone.

Poetry and Painting united in Ryggen's weaving.  In 1952, she based a work on a verse from T.S. Eliot'"Little Gidding", the last of four poems in Four Quartets. She explores a theme common to some weavings, that of the power of  love in  both physical and political sense.  At the base of the tapestry, she wove in a Norwegian translation of these lines from Eliot's poem:  "Who then devised the torment? Love.  / Love is the unfamiliar Name/ Behind the hands that wove/The Intolerable shirt of flame/Which human power cannot remove./ We only live, only suspire. Consumed by either fire or fire." 

I will leave it there , as too many are being consumed by the wildfires raging now in California.  The smoke is in the air. 

17th c dress from Dutch shipwreck 17th c on display Kaap Skil museum, Texel Island, North Dutch coast. until May 16

The dress, along with other items such as a lice-comb made from cow horn nestled in its red velvet holder or a perfume bottle to be filled with flowers and worn around the neck, is part of an exhibition called "Garde Robe" (Wardrobe) on show until May 16 at the Kaap Skil museum on the island of Texel off the northern Dutch coast. © Kaap Skil. 


THE HAGUE (AFP).- A 17th century silk dress found perfectly preserved with hundreds of other objects in a shipwreck swallowed below the seabed off the Dutch coast has gone on display in a unique exhibition. 

"The clothes are so intact, you could wear them," enthused Dutch archaeologist Rob van Eerden, saying the discovery was almost like the opening of "Tutankhamen's tomb". 

The dress, along with other items such as a lice-comb made from cow horn nestled in its red velvet holder or a perfume bottle to be filled with flowers and worn around the neck, is part of an exhibition called "Garde Robe" (Wardrobe) on show until May 16 at the Kaap Skil museum on the island of Texel off the northern Dutch coast.

They were all part of a discovery by an amateur diving club, which found the three-masted sailing ship dubbed the "Palmhoutwrak" lying some five metres (15 feet) below the sandy seabed. The ship appears to have been immediately engulfed by sand when it sank off the remote Dutch coast "creating an environment lacking in oxygen, perfect for preservation," Van Eerden told AFP. 

Five members of a local diving club had been exploring the wreck since first discovering it in 2009. But on one "exciting" chance dive in the summer of 2014, they saw something new. "The sand which had been covering the ship had been swept away by the sea. And in the hull we discovered fragments of wooden caskets in which fabric had been stowed," said Gerrit Jan Betsema, a 58-year-old who has been diving for the past three decades. Some of it appeared to be a kind of damask, a glorious heavy silk with a flowery embroidery. It unfolded to reveal a long-sleeved, tight-waisted dress, with a high-neck collar, and a wide, full-pleated skirt, dating back four centuries. 

Catherine Howard, by William Larkin. 

Royal cargo? 
It resembles a dress worn by a noble lady called Catherine Howard, the wife of a prominent English landowner, in an early 17th-century painting by William Larkin.  "All the clothes are the same size and may have belonged to one woman, who was likely fleeing the Civil War," said Van Eerden. Early analysis of the wreck shows it was built and sank in the mid-17th century -- a time of great turmoil in England when King Charles I was pushed off the throne during the rebellion led by Oliver Cromwell. 

The treacherous waters off the northern Dutch coast are strewn with shipwrecks from different epochs.  But mystery abounds over who was on board this boat when it sank, and speculation has deepened as a book cover was found among the belongings bearing the seal of the English royal family, the Stuarts, which had links to the Dutch royal house of Orange-Nassau. 

A team of some 10 experts at the North Holland provincial archaeological centre, the Huis Van Hilde, have been entrusted with the task of dating the hundreds of objects brought back to the surface. It is a painstaking task carried out by comparing the objects with paintings and tracing back the origins of the materials. 

Some of the fabric seems to have come from Turkey, India or even as far away as Persia as it is embroidered with flowers and animals unknown in Europe at the time. "It is such an exceptional discovery and so unexpected that we are calling on different disciplines to determine what type of research to undertake," said Van Eerden. 

As for the wreck -- which remains almost intact at the bottom of the shallow Wadden Sea stretching

from the Netherlands to Denmark -- it is to be re-covered in sand to protect it from erosion until better excavation techniques are developed to allow it to be safely hoisted to the surface. 

Carol Bier's website for 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning play "Disgraced "at Berkeley Theater

• Professor Carol Bier, who now lives in Berkeley, California, and who I know from the Textile Museum in Washington DC in years past , --- a historian of Islamic art, created this website on geometric symmetry and pattern—key elements characteristic of much Islamic art, and central to Disgraced’s Emily’s artwork—focused on oriental carpets.  The website is:  Symmetry and Pattern  The Art of Oriental Carpets. 

Tracing Patterns of Textiles in Ancient Java TAC DE Young Museum .

Saturday, October 10, 2015, 10 a.m. TRACING PATTERNS OF TEXTILES IN ANCIENT JAVA (8TH-15TH CENTURY) With Sandra Sardjono, PhD Candidate, History of Art, UC Berkeley 

This was an illuminating effort on the part of someone who has served as a conservator of Javanese texiles in a museum, and then as a curator at LACMA, and now is doing her Phd at U Cal Berkeley.  She is seeking to make connections between archaeological discoveries of stone relief carving, sculpture and what it has to tell us about textiles.  So far, she simply finds continuity, and illustrates by the consistency of certain patterns.  Her research needs completion, and so far she has found 20 samples of textiles in the sculpture at Premamben, which tells the story of The Ramayana. Marsha Reichle, curator at the Asia Museum, gave a presentation, "Reading" the Ramayana Through Javanese Temple reliefs, guiding us through each relief at Candi Prambanan this friday, October 16.    I am especially interested as I will visit this site in late December. 

I was reminded of my own publication, of a Mesopotamian textile, based on sculptural and archaeological evidence, which was presented and well received at the national meeting of the Textile Arts Society in America, in Madison, WIsconsin.    ARS TEXTRINA A Journal of Textiles and Costume  Volume Twenty-Two December 1994.  Winnipeg, Canada.  pp. 193-216   "My Lady":  Weaving a New Thread of Connection in Ancient Sumer".   I look at Queen Napirasu from Susa highlighting embroidery and spangled tunic,  as reflected on a bronze sculpture.   I focus on the detail of a figure of Enheduanna, with a flounced gown, a sculptural disc found in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.