San Francisco Asian Art Museum Supporters Visit Macan Tidur
The “Jade Circle” of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum visited Macan Tidur last week during a cultural tour of Bali. Accompanied by chief curator, Forrest McGill, they arrived dressed in Balinese adat clothing, looking elegant. It wasn’t “fancy dress day” for the Jade Circle, they were dressed to attend the royal cremation ceremony taking place in Ubud later that day.
During the morning, I delivered a lecture on diversity in Balinese textile traditions, which was followed by a lively discussion and some hands-on study of textiles. I had put up an entire wall of traditional Balinese textiles from my collection, which looked a bit like a souk, but certainly illustrated the tremendous diversity of Balinese textiles. From prada to ider-ider with talismanic drawings, the variety of weavings draped on the gallery hanging bars was dizzying.
It’s All Greek to Me
I love it when I see antique textiles serving as inspiration for new ones. And here is a lovely example: Naxos upholstery fabric by the Pollack Studio in a high-tech cotton blend, woven in Switzerland. The inspiration for this elegant jacquard seems to have been an embroidered pillow cover from the Greek islands dating from the 17th or 18th century. How did I figure that out, you may ask?
While browsing for upholstery fabric for a client I came upon Pollack’s Naxos and remembered a “Textile of the Month” I saw on the Textile Museum’s website about a year ago. The image above shows the old and the new, and that both are very beautiful textiles.
Find Textile Info at Warp Speed
Find out about textiles fast. The Arthur D. Jenkins Library at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. has a fantastic online resource called “Textile Muse“. It’s a search system for going through the library’s archives to find publications and visual material related to textiles of the world. Not only does the search site work great, it looks great, too. No need to pore over bibliographies from conferences and dealer websites, just ask the Textile Muse.
Indonesian Textiles @ ArtIC
From last December until March an extraordinary exhibition of Indonesian textiles was up at the venerable Art Institute of Chicago, entitled The Art of Indonesian Textiles. It closed in March, so if you didn’t go, you missed it. But you can still get the book, which is as extraordinary as the exhibition.
The Design Library for Textilians
An amazing resource in New York State, serving the world. The Design Library sells and licenses antique textile designs from their vast collection of original documentary textiles. Most of their clients are in home furnishing, fashion and graphic design industries. They have satellite offices in London and Manhattan, and staff who can assist clients to find what they are looking for among the Design Library’s five million or so textile designs. For “textilians” this is a mother lode of inspiration.