Susi Johnston Bali Blog

The Ashmolean is rebooting. Big plans and improvements are underway, with 39 new galleries happening, to the tune of £61 million. Among them is a major new space for textiles. Textilism is officially a trend. In recent years numerous upper-echelon museums have created spaces devoted to textiles as art, notably the DeYoung in SF, among others.

The textile tale of the Ash in a nutshell: The Ash says one of its “best kept secrets is its large collection of textiles.” Just announced, £122,000 was awarded to the museum to support their forthcoming textiles gallery and allow more of the cloth in their collection to go on display. The collection numbers something over 4,000 pieces (that’s just twice my own private collection, interestingly). Download a flyer on the new textiles gallery here.

The New Ash reopens with a bash this November. If we had an invite for the opening night we would surely be there despite it being half a world away.

An exhibition “Indonesian Textiles as Art” opened on 19 July at the Museum Pasifika in Nusa Dua, Bali. We were there. We saw. And we agreed wholeheartedly with the stance of Georges Breguet who mounted the exhibition, that the best textile arts of the archipelago are indeed art, and should be viewed as such. Read more…

The textile traditions of Indonesia are no longer ethnographic curiosities. They are the material of couture creations that can take you from the beach to the ballroom and out on the streets of the world’s culture capitals in capital style. 

Not convinced? Just take a look at the chic ikat resort wear, above, created by Ratna Panggabean, one of the country’s most prestigious fashion designers and an outspoken evangelist for Indonesian textile arts. 

Then visit the annual exhibition of Adiwastra Nusantara, an organisation devoted to exposing and promoting the traditional textile techniques of the Indonesian archipelago. This year’s show is entitled “Beyond Fashion! Art to Wear” and will take place 15 – 19 April at the National Convention Centre in Jakarta.

Read more…

 In difficult times we need reasons to be cheerful, so here are some rags to be glad about. SF Tribal, a consortium of art dealers from the Bay Area, has posted a slew of new images on their group site. The ratio of textiles to objects is high. Why? SF is a textilian town, and its astute collectors were early adopters of the concept of tribal textiles as Art with a capital “A”. 

Why do they think that way about textiles? See for yourself.

The San Francisco Tribal Art & Textiles Fair is normally the most lively fixture on the tribal/textiles circuit. Held every year in February, the show draws over 100 dealers from around the world and buyers from across America. This year’s show was predictably lackluster in terms of sales, but still brilliant in terms of the art on exhibit.

Has Chicago’s Minasian Oriental Rug Gallery gone flat? In a certain sense, yes – - they’ve hung a fabulous show of Indonesian flatweave textiles rather than their usual rugs. The exhibition, entitled “Island Magic: Court and Tribal Textiles from Indonesia” runs through the 10th of January, and was reviewed in HALI this month.

Rare, old ceremonial textiles of Indonesia have been attracting far more serious attention recently, as they should. Museums in both Chicago and Los Angeles have major shows of Indonesian textiles on their exhibition calendars for 2008-2009.

Images © 2008, HALI Magazine

Better late than never, here’s a review of the October group show by SF|Tribal, an association of Bay Area dealers. This year the event, entitled Primal at the Presidio, had a superb venue (Herbst Pavilion), for the weekend show and opening party.

Numerous prominent dealers in fine Indonesian textiles and artefacts were exhibiting, including Tom Murray, Joe Loux, Andres Moraga, Vicki Shiba, Frank Wiggers, Erik Farrow, Michael Auliso. There’s Tom (below) with tribal and textile expert, Cathryn Cootner who guided a morning sneak preview walk-through for collectors and scholars. Here’s a list and details about the SF Tribal dealers.

As a footnote, Tom was just here in Bali, and we had a very cordial chat with him during the vernissage at Biasa Artspace on Monday. No explanation of his off-season visit to Bali was given. Tom works in mysterious ways.

Have you got an eye for textiles? Test your textile memory with the Maharam Memory Game, a beautiful, enjoyable and relevant freebie on Maharam’s marvelous website. The game involves remembering the location of textile swatches and pairing them up on screen. Be warned: it’s compulsive.

Maharam is a fourth-generation family run textile business based in New York, with a star line-up of collaborators (including Hella Jongerius, Andrée Putman and Paul Smith), and collections by some of the 20th century’s leading designers (like Gio Ponti, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffman, and Charles & Ray Eames). 

Maharam’s website is an Aladdin’s cave of gorgeous cloth (like “Massive Paisley”, above), and an absolute delight to use, underlining the company’s long-standing emphasis on service. And, of course, on design. They even grew their own graphic design team called Studio A4, which is evidently bursting with talent. 

Let’s start taking textiles seriously as visual art. Hundreds of different cultures all over the planet have produced woven works that are so far beyond fashion or decoration as to merit being regarded simply as works of abstract visual art. Kathleen Taylor is one of the handful of textile dealers who clearly thinks this way. Her diverse collection crosses every border, and brings many excellent examples of textile art to light.

Early 20th c. Chinese wave border sections.

18^th century Zoroastrian embroidered panel.

Late 19th c. kaitag from the Caucasus region.

Joe Loux, one of the few tribal art and textile dealers whose tastes coincide almost unerringly with my own, is showing this dazzling patola in the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Tribal group at the Presidio. The exhibition opens with a benefit bash on 10 October, with proceeds going to the De Young Museum’s oceanic, tribal and textile arts departments. It runs through the weekend.

Among the dealers exhibiting are my friends Tom Murray, Andres Moraga, Wenhua Liu, and Frank Whiggers. Moraga has a keen eye for textile art, and never fails to put things up on the wall that make eyes pop, jaws drop, and cause contemporary art collectors to go into paroxysms of glee.

Coming back to the textile above. Loux’s patola will be of particular interest to collectors and scholars of Indonesian textiles. The double-ikat silk patola textiles of Gujarat have been influential prototypes for prestige textiles woven in Indonesia over the past five hundred years or more. They were highly prized and easily transported trade goods exchanged to get access to the natural and human resources of the Indonesian archipelago. The patola influence is so pervasive in Indonesian textiles as to be almost ubiquitous. Whenever a distinctive patola turns up, it is avidly inspected by collectors and scholars to ascertain whether the pattern may have been a precursor or inspiration for specific patterns of Indonesian textiles.

Balinese geringsing double ikat textiles, and cepuk weft-ikat textiles both directly quote patola motifs and have done so for centuries. Some of the more unusual types of geringsing and cepuk show variations on the patola theme with origins that remain elusive. So every patola that we have a chance to study and appreciate, may represent a meaningful piece of the jigsaw puzzle which helps us to better understand geringsing, cepuk, and many other textile traditions in Indonesia.

Both geringsing and cepuk, by the way, are regarded by the Balinese as objects with “magical” powers, and are used in a variety of rituals, to this day.