Robert Goldwater Library blog

Sunday @ the Met: African textiles

Sunday, February 1
Design Without End

This afternoon program focuses on Africa’s rich textile tradition in a contemporary context.

Speakers include Alisa LaGamma, curator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Christine Giuntini, textile conservator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and John Mack, Professor of World Studies, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, University of East Anglia.

2:00–4:30 p.m.
Free with Museum Admission

Click here for the Feb. 1 listing on the Museum's Web Site

Click here for the full program of upcoming events surrounding "African Textiles: Design Without End"

at left:
Interior Hanging
Mali or Ghana; Fulani (?), 19th century
Cotton, wool; 51 x 120 in. (129.5 x 304.8 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1971 (1971.30)

East African commemorative banner

via Artnet magazine:

An East African banner commemorating Barack Obama’s election, with a text in Swahili reading "God has blessed us with peace and love.

Screenings at the Met: Bonne arrivée à Bamako (1998)

Karim Akadiri Soumaïla, director. Follows the journey of Paris-based Malian fashion designer Xuly Bët (born Lamine Badiane Kouyaté) to Bamako, where he returned to create a new collection based on local materials and fabrics and to meet the photographer Malick Sidibé (52 min.). French with English subtitles.

This film from the Real Life Documentary Film Festival, Accra, Ghana, will be introduced by Awam Amkpa and Lydie Diakhaté, founders and directors of the festival. This film is shown in conjunction with the special exhibition The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End.

Free with Museum admission *
6:00 p.m., Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, Uris Center for Education

* Due to seating limitations, this program will be ticketed. Tickets are free with Museum admission and may be picked up on a first-come, first-served basis at the Event Desk in the Uris Center for Education beginning at 5:00 p.m. on the afternoon of the event.

Photo of Xuly Bët from egodesign.ca

A conversation with... : El Anatsui

Sunday, November 9 @ 3:00 pm

An Afternoon with El Anatsui

A conversation between El Anatsui, artist,

&

Alisa LaGamma, curator,

Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

Free with Museum admission

Contemporary artist El Anatsui, whose work recently acquired by the Met is a centerpiece of the exhibition The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End, discusses his art in an interview with Alisa LaGamma, curator of the exhibition.

This program is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with
New York University’s Africa House and Grey Art Gallery.

Kwame Appiah to lecture Friday on African textiles

African Textiles
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the
University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Africa’s cultural heritage has much to tell us about the region’s relationship to the world at large. The vibrant textile traditions of Africa are extremely diverse in materials, modes of production, and motifs. Dazzling silk and cotton kente woven in Ghana, earth-toned mud cloth from Mali, and deep indigo–toned fabrics dyed in northern Nigeria all reflect cross-cultural connections.
Friday, October 24, 6:00: $23
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

For subscription program tickets call (212) 570-3949, Monday–Saturday, 9:30–5:00, and
Sunday, 12:00–5:00. You may also visit the Concerts & Lectures box office in the Museum’s Great Hall, Tuesday–Thursday, 10:00–4:30, Friday–Saturday, 10:00–7:00 and Sunday, 12:00–5:00, or go to www.metmuseum.org/tickets.

Photo source

Podcast Interview with Sokari Douglas Camp

via metmuseum.org:

The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End

Curator Alisa LaGamma talks to artist Sokari Douglas Camp about her work, including the steel sculpture Nigerian Woman Shopping, which is featured in the special exhibition "The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End."

Episode Date: October 14, 2008

Download the audio file. (18.39 MB)

Listen to the full audio program. (13:23 minutes)

Learn more about this exhibition.

Episode transcript.

image source

African textiles, then and now, at The Met + Grey Art Gallery

African textiles, then and now (above, a video by Grace Ndiritu). More Photos >

via NYTimes:

Art Review | 'The Essential Art of African Textiles'
African Art, Modern and Traditional: Seductive Patterns From a Rich Palette

To the casual Western eye “African art” equals “African sculpture” — masks, headdresses and ritual figures. As two new exhibitions make clear, this picture is laughably outdated.

Many contemporary African artists would point to textile, rather than sculpture, as the tradition with the strongest impact on their work. The Nigerian-born, London-based artist Yinka Shonibare, for one, has extrapolated an entire career from the fascinating colonial history of the fabrics known as Dutch wax prints.

“The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents 19th-century fabrics alongside a few relevant contemporary artworks. Flipping the scales, “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art,” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, emphasizes the place of traditional textiles in works by contemporary African artists.

The exhibitions were conceived and organized independently, and there is considerable overlap on the contemporary end. Both, however, are worth a visit.

The older textiles at the Met are rare, exceptional pieces, many on loan from the British Museum. They contain “the DNA,” in the curator Alisa LaGamma’s words, of contemporary works by El Anatsui and others. But the 20th-century textiles and contemporary artworks at the Grey, organized by the gallery’s director, Lynn Gumpert, offer a more generous swath (so to speak) of Africa’s current visual culture.

“Sibu VIII,” from “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” 2003, by Nontsikelelo "Lolo" Veleko

Their heir apparent, the young South African Lolo Veleko, takes color photographs of Johannesburg teenagers modeling brightly hued sportswear on the street.

Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met’s 2005 exhibition “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams” hinted that textiles had been undervalued in the Western canon, offering ample proof that North African cloths were as important to Matisse as Gabon figures and Grebo masks were to Picasso. The museum’s current show may not have the same blockbuster appeal, but it goes deeper into the techniques and traditions that make the fabrics so striking and seductive.

The patterns of African textiles fall into three categories: woven, dyed, and printed or painted. In many woven fabrics, like kente cloth, narrow hand-loomed bands are joined together. Curiously, the designs of many dyed fabrics echo the structure imposed by the loom, conveying a sense that the strip, or band, is to African art as the grid is to Western postwar painting.

One of the Met show’s most spectacular pairings matches Mr. Anatsui’s “Between Earth and Heaven,” a recent acquisition, with a kente prestige cloth from Ghana (in the collection of the British Museum). Using folded and linked aluminum caps from liquor bottles, Mr. Anatsui echoes the rhythmic tension between warp- and weft-face stripes exemplified in the kente. The works also share a palette of red, indigo and gold, although gold dominates in Mr. Anatsui’s shimmering metal “tapestry.”

As the son and brother of Ewe weavers in Ghana, Mr. Anatsui has clearly internalized some of the principles of kente cloth design. This easy, familial relationship to fabric is typical of the contemporary artists in the exhibition. Another Ghanaian, Atta Kwami, is the son of the noted textile designer Grace Salome Kwami. In a statement that accompanies his small paintings and prints, Mr. Kwami mentions his mother’s work in the same breath as the paintings of Sean Scully and Piet Mondrian -- with none of the art-craft, insider-outsider hang-ups Westerners so often display.

An alternative to weaving can be seen in several adinkra and adire wrappers (Yoruba textiles made by stamping fabric with dark pigment or painting on it with a starchy paste that resists dye). These feature quiltlike blocks of pattern instead of bands and are often dyed a deep indigo blue. The contemporary artist Rachid Koraichi, who appears in both exhibitions, makes reference to the complex history and geography of indigo in large vertical banners filled with text from an eighth-century Sufi mystic. They are beautiful, if arcane.

While some of the larger textiles at the Met were commissioned as architectural decoration, others were made to be worn. Most impressive are two voluminous men’s robes, from Nigeria and Liberia, with Islamic-style embroidery over striped weavings.

Women, particularly in Nigeria, were traditionally outfitted in many layers of fabric. As one 19th-century observer, quoted in the catalog, described the wives of Bonny chiefs, “They sported sometimes five, six, or more pieces of different kinds of cloth about them, especially when going to any of their festivals, so that the body looks like a roll or truss of yarn at both ends.”

One of the show’s discoveries, Grace Ndiritu, uses printed fabrics in videos. In “The Nightingale” (2003), at the Met, she coyly winds and unwinds a headscarf. In a more evocative four-screen video installation at the Grey, she tweaks the seductive role of textiles in Matisse’s paintings: allowing her bare limbs to peek out from behind curtains or posing as a mummified Olympia.

At both the Grey gallery and the Met, studio portraits by the Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé make abundant use of textiles as props and backdrops. Their heir apparent, the young South African Lolo Veleko, takes color photographs of Johannesburg teenagers modeling brightly hued sportswear on the street.

Any show of contemporary African textiles would be incomplete without some reference to commercial wax-print fabrics (the ubiquitous brightly patterned cloth made in the Netherlands and, more recently, East Asia for an African market). The Grey’s selection illustrates the breadth of wax-print designs: some reproduce images of political and religious leaders, while others feature bold abstract motifs.

Mr. Shonibare, the best known of the contemporary artists in these shows, makes exhaustive use of wax prints — sometimes as autobiography, sometimes as postcolonial satire. At the Met his benignly decorative installation “100 Years” consists of a grid of rectangles of stretched wax-print fabric, each one selectively modified with a paintbrush. The works at Grey are toothier: a wax-print upholstered dollhouse of the artist’s home in East London, a child-size mannequin in a wax-print dress cut to a Victorian pattern.

Seeing Mr. Shonibare’s art in an Afrocentric context, one comes to realize how much it relies on the history, and vernacular artistry, of wax-print cloth — and on Western viewers’ relative ignorance of both. The work of Mr. Anatsui, on the other hand, only becomes more profound as its underlying conventions are exposed.

“The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End” continues through March 22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art” continues through Dec. 6 at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village; (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 10, 2008, on page C32 of the New York edition.

The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End Opens September 30

The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End
September 30, 2008–March 22, 2009
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor

Dazzling textile traditions have constituted an important form of aesthetic expression throughout Africa’s history and cultural landscape. Textiles have long been a focal point of the vast continental trading networks that carried material culture and technological innovations across regional centers and linked Africa to the outside world. Leading contemporary artists reflecting on Africa’s distinctive cultural heritage and its relationship to the world at large have drawn upon the imagery of textiles in sculpture, painting, photography, installation art, video, and other media.

This exhibition illustrates the stunningly diverse classical textile genres created by artists in West Africa through some of their earliest documented and finest works. Highlights of the Metropolitan’s own holdings will be presented along with some twenty works that entered The British Museum’s collection by the early twentieth century. Selected works will represent inventive variations on major themes of the influential classical genres. The exhibition will relate these genres to contemporary art forms by affording an appreciation of the cultural context and visual language of these traditions and exploring their synergy and resonance in works by eight living artists.

The publication The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press will accompany this exhibition.

The exhibition is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fred and Rita Richman, and The Ceil & Michael E. Pulitzer Foundation, Inc.

It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the British Museum, London.

=================

EDUCATION PROGRAMS

September 30, 2008–March 22, 2009

LECTURE/DISCUSSION
Saturday, October 4
Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall

Crossing Paths, Bridging Genres: Textile Sources in Contemporary Ghanaian Art
Doran H. Ross, senior research scholar, The James S. Coleman African Studies Center,
University of California at Los Angeles
2:00

Panel Discussion: Modes of Contemporary Expression in Africa (to 4:45)
Following the lecture is a panel featuring artists whose work relates to the exhibition and leading scholars in the fields of art history, history, and African studies. Alisa LaGamma, curator, and Christine Giuntini, textile conservator, both of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, moderate.

Artists: Abdoulaye Konaté, Atta Kwami, Grace Ndiritu, Oyenike Okundaye, Duro Olowu,
and Sue Williamson

Scholars: Christa Clarke, Curator of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, The Newark Museum; Mamadou Diouf, Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and director, Institute of African Studies, Columbia University; Chika Okeke-Agulu, assistant professor, Center for African American Studies and Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University; and Zoë Strother, Riggio Professor of African Art, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

This lecture and panel discussion are organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with New York University’s Africa House and Grey Art Gallery.
.
Programs are free with Museum admission contribution unless otherwise noted.

_____________

CONCERTS & LECTURES
SUBSCRIPTION PROGRAM

Lecture

African Textiles
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the
University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Africa’s cultural heritage has much to tell us about the region’s relationship to the world at large. The vibrant textile traditions of Africa are extremely diverse in materials, modes of production, and motifs. Dazzling silk and cotton kente woven in Ghana, earth-toned mud cloth from Mali, and deep indigo–toned fabrics dyed in northern Nigeria all reflect cross-cultural connections.
Friday, October 24, 6:00: $23
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

For subscription program tickets call (212) 570-3949, Monday–Saturday, 9:30–5:00, and
Sunday, 12:00–5:00. You may also visit the Concerts & Lectures box office in the Museum’s Great Hall, Tuesday–Thursday, 10:00–4:30, Friday–Saturday, 10:00–7:00 and Sunday, 12:00–5:00, or go to www.metmuseum.org/tickets.

_____________

SUNDAYS AT THE MET

Sunday, November 9
An Afternoon with El Anatsui
A conversation between El Anatsui, artist, and Alisa LaGamma, curator, Department of the
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
3:00
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

Contemporary artist El Anatsui, whose work recently acquired by the Met is a centerpiece of the exhibition, discusses his art in an interview with Alisa LaGamma, curator of the exhibition.

This program is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with
New York University’s Africa House and Grey Art Gallery.

Sunday, February 1
Design Without End
This afternoon program focuses on Africa’s rich textile tradition in a contemporary context.
Speakers include Alisa LaGamma, curator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and
the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Christine Giuntini, textile conservator,
Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and John Mack, Professor of World Studies, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, University of East Anglia.
2:00–4:30

_____________

GALLERY TALKS
Meet at exhibition entrance, Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas,
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, first floor.

Wednesday, October 29, 4:00. Yaëlle Biro
Thursday, November 20, 11:00. Alisa LaGamma
Friday, December 19, 11:00. Alisa LaGamma
Wednesday, January 21, 11:00. Yaëlle Biro
Tuesday, February 10, 11:00. Yaëlle Biro
Tuesday, March 17, 11:00. Yaëlle Biro
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

_____________

DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Three Friday screenings of films from the 2008 Real Life Documentary Film Festival, Accra,
Ghana, with an introduction by Awam Amkpa and Lydie Diakhaté, founders and directors of the festival. Due to seating limitations, these screenings will be ticketed. Tickets are free with Museum admission and may be picked up on a first-come, first-served basis at the Event Desk in the Uris Center for Education beginning at 5:00 on the afternoon of the event. All screenings occur in the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, Uris Center for Education.

Awaiting for Men (2007), directed by Katy Lena Ndiaye (Senegal/Belgium). Tells the story
of three women from the “red city” Oualata—at the extreme east of the Mauritanian desert. As they paint and decorate the city walls, the women express themselves with a surprising sense of freedom in a society dominated by tradition, religion, and men (56 min.). Arabic with English Subtitles. Co-winner of the 2008 Walter Mosley Award for best documentary in the international competition.
Friday, October 17, 6:00

Bonne arrivée à Bamako (1998), directed by Karim Akadiri Soumaïla (France/Nigeria).
Follows the journey of the Paris-based Malian fashion designer Xuly Bët (born Lamine Badiane Kouyaté) to Bamako, where he returned to create a new collection based on local materials and fabrics and to meet the photographer Malick Sidibé (52 min.). French with English subtitles.
Friday, November 14, 6:00

Glorious Exit (2007), directed by Kevin Mertz (Switzerland). Jarreth Merz, an actor of
Swiss-Nigerian extraction living in Los Angeles, grapples with his heritage when he learns
that his father has passed away. According to Nigerian tradition, the first-born is responsible for a father’s burial, and Merz begins a journey of discovery back to his origins and a family he hardly knows (75 min). Co-winner of the 2008 Walter Mosley Award for best documentary in the international competition.
Friday, December 12, 6:00

These screenings are organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Real Life Documentary Festival.

_____________

PODCAST AND VIDEO
El Anatsui
African artist El Anatsui discusses the meaning, influences, and creative process behind his
2006 sculpture Between Earth and Heaven—a large, undulating, tapestry-like work made from aluminum, copper wire, and thousands of bottle caps—with The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curator of African art, Alisa LaGamma. This sculpture is on view in the exhibition.
Listen to or download this Met Podcast episode at www.metmuseum.org/podcast.

El Anatsui Installing Between Earth and Heaven
To view a related video in which curator Alisa LaGamma and artist El Anatsui talk about
the installation of Between Earth and Heaven and its significance, go to the “Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas” playlist at www.youtube.com/user/metmuseum.

_____________

FAMILY PROGRAMS
Family Orientations
The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End
These one-hour slide introductions to the special exhibition are designed for young visitors
and their adult companions.
Wednesday, October 1, 11:30–12:30, 1:00–2:00, 2:30–3:30
Saturday, October 4, 3:00–4:00 and 4:30–5:30
North Classroom, Uris Center for Education

_____________

SERVICES FOR VISITORS WITH DISABILITIES
“Picture This!” A Workshop for Visitors Who Are Blind or Partially Sighted
Participants learn about works in the exhibition through description and discussion.
Thursday, October 16, 2:00–4:00
This program is free, but places are limited. Reservations required; please call (212) 879-5500, ext. 3561 or email access@metmuseum.org.

The Museum is committed to serving all audiences. Please call us about services, including Sign Language–interpreted programs, Verbal Imaging Tours, the Touch Collection, and other programs. Voice: (212) 879-5500, ext. 3561; TTY: (212) 570-3828

_____________

NOLEN LIBRARY IN
THE RUTH AND HAROLD D. URIS CENTER FOR EDUCATION
Nolen Library has information about the Museum’s collection, special exhibitions, and a
Teacher Resource Center with a circulating collection for educators. There is also a Children’s Reading Room, a specially designed space for families to read together from books in the library’s collection. For further information please call (212) 570-3788.

_____________

WEBSITE
For further information about our programs, visit the Museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org.
The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End

The exhibition is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fred and Rita Richman, and The Ceil & Michael E. Pulitzer Foundation, Inc. It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the British Museum, London.

_____________

 

PARALLEL EXHIBITION

The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY
September 16–December 6, 2008

Lecture at New York University
Seeing and Wearing: Textiles in West Africa
John Picton, Emeritus Professor of African Art, University of London
Wednesday, November 12, 7:00
Silver Center, New York University
100 Washington Square East, Room 300, New York, NY

This lecture is organized by New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and co-sponsored by the Fine Arts Society, a New York University student organization. For more information about the exhibition and related programs, visit www.nyu.edu/greyart,
email greygallery@nyu.edu, or call (212) 998-6780.

Heidi King: Peruvian featherwork show

Radiance from the Rainforest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru, By Heidi King. Tribal Art, no. 48 (spring 2008), p. 64-67.

Available in print in the Goldwater Library (A W97 No. 48 (Spring 2008)) or Online via WilsonWeb.

Crown
Chimú 14th–15th century
Fiber, hide, reeds, copper, feathers; H. 10 1/4 in. (26 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Jane Costello Goldberg, from the Collection of Arnold I. Goldberg, 1986 (1987.394.655)

Textile Museum exhibit tangled up in blue

Reblogged from the Textile Museum web site:

BLUE
April 4 - September 18, 2008

> Hiroyuki Shindo, Shindigo Space 07 (detail), 2006. 'Shindigo shibori'-dyed cotton and hemp and Shindigo balls (polystyrene wrapped with hemp and dip-dyed). Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joel Chester Fildes.

The human perception of color is a complex sensory phenomenon filtered through the eyes, brain, language and multiple layers of social experience. While shades of red (examined in the 2007 Textile Museum exhibition RED) quicken the pulse and increase blood pressure, blue induces a calming effect and is widely perceived as a “cool,” tranquil color.

> Kain panjang (long cloth, hip wrapper) detail, Indonesia, Yogyakarta (in the style of Ceribon), Chinese-Indonesian, 20th century. Commercial cotton, resist patterning. The Textile Museum 1998.11.16. Gift of Beverly Deffef Labin Collection.

BLUE explores the creation and meaning of the color blue on textiles produced across time and place, with particular emphasis on contemporary artists’ use of natural indigo dyes. Until the invention of chemical dyes in the late 19th century, peoples worldwide relied largely on indigo-bearing plants to achieve blue-colored garments, household furnishings, artworks and even body paint. Many cultures attributed talismanic properties as well as health benefits to indigo, and the mysterious transformation of this temperamental dye has long been steeped in myth and magic .... 

BLUE is curated by Lee Talbot, Assistant Curator, Eastern Hemisphere Collections, and Mattiebelle Gittinger, Research Associate, Southeast Asian Textiles.

Associated Events:
(Registration required)

April 10

BLUE Lecture Series: "A Passion for Indigo: My Fascination with the Exotic Past and Exciting Future of this Unique Dyestuff"
Jenny Balfour-Paul, Scholar and Artist
Thursday, 6:30 pm

April 24

BLUE Lecture Series: "African Blues"
Lisa Aronson, Associate Professor of Art History, Skidmore College
Thursday, 6:30 pm

May 1

BLUE Lecture Series: "Transforming Blue: From Seed to Dye, Indigo in Contemporary Japan"
Rowland Ricketts, III, Artist
Thursday, 6:30 pm

May 15

BLUE Lecture Series: "Indigo Immortal: The History and Global Culture of Levi's Jeans"
Lynn Downey, Historian, Levi Strauss and Company
Thursday, 6:30 pm

May 22

BLUE Lecture Series: "Indigo: A Personal Journey"                      
Hiroyuki Shindo, Artist and Mary Lance, Filmmaker
Thursday, 6:30 pm