Art and Design Commons^™

Kākahu As Cultural Identity, Christina Hurihia Wirihana

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Discussion will begin with my interpretation of this whakatauaki (proverb.) I liken the centre shoot of the flax bush to the kaitiaki (guardian of weaving knowledge) referencing the creation of Kākahu, the traditional cloak and customary dress of Maori people. Nurture this (the flaxbush) and it will flourish for many generations. The sustanibility of the flaxbush will ensure a constant supply of natural fibres required to create Kākahu.

The kaitiaki will inspire the singing birds and witness the weavers nimble fingers engaging the aho (weft thread) and whenu (warp thread), when forming the kaupapa or foundation of a Kākahu. …

Trade Cloth On American Whaleships, 1820-1870 “Liberty With A Roll Of Calico”, Susan J. Jerome

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Artifacts tell an important story. While researching this topic for my master’s thesis, I discovered twenty-two cloth-covered books in museum collections. Dirty, stained, and sometimes badly faded, the fabric had been overlooked, assumed to be sail cloth.

Cotton, most of it brightly-printed, plain weave fabric, had been sewn around the covers of books purchased on shore just as we see in this picture. Several other images of the cloth covering these books will be shown. These are the fabrics that went to sea, procured from slop chests and sewn by hand onto leather or cardboard-bound journals and account books. These …

Prosperity, Longevity, And “Happily Ever-After”: Symbolism And The Sophistication Of Implication In Japanese E-Gasuri (Picture Ikat) Textiles, Ann Marie Moeller

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper explores the elegant indirectness that certain e-gasuri patterns exhibit while using traditional symbols to express familiar Japanese sayings and concepts. E-gasuri is the Japanese word for fabrics patterned with pictures created with the ikat resist dying technique. Kasuri essentially means ikat. Kasuri becomes gasuri in the compound word e-gasuri. E means picture. The ikat technique of dying threads before they are woven produces images with blurred outlines. This blurred appearance is a treasured aspect of the e-gasuri aesthetic. E-gasuri is usually (but not exclusively) associated today with indigo resist dyed blue and white cotton and …

Weaving Cloth From Tosa-Washi (Japanese Paper From Kochi In Shikoku, Japan): Connection And Expansion Of Area And People, Yuka Matsumoto

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Preface

Tosa-washi (Japanese paper from Kochi Prefecture in Shikoku, Japan) has been made in Kochi since the tenth century and Tosa-washi which was the first product of Tosa region was supplied to the Edo shogunate in the Edo period of the seventeenth century. The manufacture of Tosa-washi has been placed on the traditional industry of Kochi until now. It was specified in The Traditional Craftwork of the country in 1976, and specified in The Important Intangible Cultural Asset of the country in 2001. This study focuses on the creative activities of two craftswomen who weave washi-textile called shifu using Tosa-washi, …

Iowa Or Dye! Natural Dyes As American Craft And Horticulture, Sara J. Kadolph

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Natural dyes are colorants derived from specific items found in the natural environment: plants, insects, animals, and minerals. A natural material that produces a dye is called a dyestuff. For example, the dye, madder, is extracted from madder dyestuff, the roots of a sprawling perennial, Rubia tinctorum. Many natural dyes require a mordant to permanently bond with a fiber. Mordants are usually chemical salts such as ferrous sulfate or aluminum potassium sulfate that form a bridge between the dye and the fiber. Natural dyes can be processed in several ways, including one or more water based extractions of the …

Sea Snail Purple In Contemporary Japanese Embroidery, Takako Terada

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

Purple dye

Sea snail purple, also known as Shellfish purple, Tyrian purple, Royal purple, Ancient purple or Murex purple, abbreviated to purple in this text, is a pigment obtained from the secretion of the hypobranchial glands of certain species marine mollusks (Fig. 1). The milky secretion from the glands includes a purple precursor which can be applied directly onto textiles (Fig. 2), where the final pigments are formed in the presence of oxygen and sunlight (Fig. 3). The main chemical constituent of the purple pigment was discovered by Paul Friedländer in 1909 to be 6,6′- dibromoindigo.

Purple dye in …

Norwegian Natural Dyeing: Art, Craft, Gender And Innovation - Natural Dyes As A Tradition In Norway, Mette Biering

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As you may know, Norway is located far north in Europe. We have a cold climate with a short summer, during which nature almost explodes. The country is sparsely populated, and because only 2 per cent of the land is suited for farming, Norwegians never supported themselves exclusively from growing crops. Multi-tasking and trading have always been necessary to survive “on top of the globe.”

Despite the short summers, sources for all the rainbow colors can be found in nature. Plants, trees, bark, lichen, shrubs, mushrooms, seaweed and even purple snails (Nucella lapillus), are something the old Norsemen and women …

Social Cohesion And Cultural Expressions: The Case Of The Sacred Textiles In The Armenian Orthodox Churches Of Istanbul, Marlene R. Breu, Ronald T. Marchese

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Prologue

The social and cultural history of Armenians is long; indeed one cannot fully appreciate its parameters without deeper investigation. This paper reports on a segment of Armenian history— the sacred historical textiles housed in the Armenian Orthodox Churches of Istanbul, Turkey. These artifacts had never before been studied, although a select few objects produced in Istanbul have been published in books devoted to the Armenian collections in Jerusalem, Etchmiadzin (Armenia), and the Sis collection from Anatolia currently in Beirut, Lebanon. Illuminated manuscripts receive the greatest attention among the historical Armenian religious artifacts, followed by stone, metal and wooden objects. …

Mud And Dirt: Australian Soil As Self-Expression, Di Mcpherson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Australia is a vast and ancient land of desert and mountain ranges that have been sculpted by the forces of nature resulting in a huge range of colored muds, dirts, soils and ochres. The aborigines used and continue to use, colored clays and ochres to decorate their ceremonial artifacts, bodies, caves and bark paintings. They use yellow and red obtained from ochres including ironstone and limonite, black from charcoal or manganese ore and white from pipeclay or gypsum. After grinding these finely, the aborigines mix them with water and a natural fixative of gum or resin is added if necessary. …

Eats, Shoots, And Weaves, Lisa Lee Peterson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

“I assume you’re Buddhist?” My face twisted in bewilderment. I didn’t immediately know how to answer this question.

It was Good Friday 1982, the day I first met my in-laws-to-be. My future brother-in-law and his wife had driven to the family farm in northern Indiana, ostensibly to observe the spring ritual with family, but really to observe me. My soon-to-be father-in-law raised his wine glass in a toast “to all of us who celebrate this Easter season.” He then turned to me and dropped his bombshell, “I assume you’re Buddhist?”

My mother’s maternal grandfather was one of the founding fathers …

Embroidering The Golden Chersonese: Metallic Thread Needlework In The Malay Peninsula, Hwei-Fe’N Cheah

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Historians emphasize the diversity and fluidity of Malay world identity and culture, questioning the very meaning of “Malayness.” A summary glance at early twentieth century examples of metallic thread needlework reveals the “mixed and many” Malay embroidery styles. While these styles have been associated with different regions, the relationships between them have not been examined closely. This paper assesses examples of late 19th and early 20th century embroideries from four regions in the Malay peninsula. Although not comprehensive, it highlights two particular features of peninsular Malay embroideries – the use of glass and the ways in which plant forms are …

Field Of Flowers: Mughal Carpets And Treasures, Michael Schuster

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In mid-seventeenth century South Asia, the taste for naturalistic floral sprays reached an apogee of artistic expression. During the reign of the Mughal dynasty (1526-1857), the aesthetic style pervaded the arts of South Asia. Its influence has been strong ever since; it continues to be prevalent in South Asian design today and has had an impact on aesthetic traditions of the West and China. The current exhibition illustrates this distinctive Mughal idiom and reveals the continuity of the artistic tradition in contemporary India and Pakistan. For many, the arts developed during the Mughal Empire are synonymous with taste, luxury, and …

Catching The Light, Catching The Waves: The Suzani Collection Of Doris Duke At Shangri La In Honolulu, Hawai‛I, Carol Bier

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Introduction: Doris Duke’s Shangri La and Her Suzani Collection

In 1935 tobacco heiress Doris Duke married James H. R. Cromwell and together they embarked on a year-long voyage around the world for their honeymoon. Returning home eastwards, their last port of call was Honolulu before they were to establish themselves in West Palm Beach, Florida. They found they enjoyed Honolulu, so they stayed much longer than planned. They bought a spot of land on Black Point, east of Diamond Head, and ultimately never settled in Florida.

Here, in the next couple of years, they built a house they soon dubbed …

“Pride And Practicality”, Barbara Kawakami

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Aloha! Today, I would like to take you on a vicarious journey back to the good ole’ plantation days through “Textiles As Cultural Expressions.” More than anything, clothing reflected the pride and keen sense of practicality with which the immigrants endured their hardships. This was nowhere more apparent than in Hawaii at the turn of the century, where new immigrants from China, Portugal, Spain, Japan, Korea, Philippines and other countries came to work on the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. Each ethnic group was easily distinguished by their native costumes.

From 1885 to 1924, more than 200,000 Japanese immigrants came to …

Documentary Film Presentation Local Colors: Natural Dyeing In A Milas Carpet Weaving Village, Ulara Tamura, John Wells

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This documentary, filmed in 2006, examines the process of naturally dyed carpet production in a village in the Milas region of Muğla Prefecture in southwest Turkey, a region well known as a traditional Turkish carpet production area. In large numbers of villages of this region, carpet weaving is the household based work of every woman who lives there.

In this paper, I aim to add more detailed information and discussion specifically on the colors and dyes of the carpets shown in this film. First I will introduce the varieties of the natural dye materials the villagers use one by one. …

Dress Of The Lolo, Pathen, Hmong And Yao Of Northern Vietnam In 2005-2006: Reflections Of Cultural Continuity And Change, Serena Lee Harrigan

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Ethnic Dress: Reflecting Ancestral Roots

Unknown to the vast majority of the world, many people in northern Vietnam continue to wear a distinctive costume that speaks of their ties to a unique ancestral past, ancient beliefs, and time honored cultural traditions. While ninety per cent of Vietnam’s population of 84 million is from the majority group known as Viet Kinh, Vietnam is in actuality a fascinating composite of fifty four ethnic groups. Approximately thirty of the minority groups live in northern Vietnam. Varying in size from two hundred to half a million, these groups are minute in comparison to the …

Textiles, Masculinities And Spontaneous Communities In The Burning Man Project, Susan Kaiser, Denise Nicole Green

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

What is Burning Man?

Burning Man organizers assert that “trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind.” Such enigmatic and authenticating discourse permeates the Burning Man website, as it seeks to affirm itself as a mythical, enchanted, and fantastical Bohemian space. Quite simply, the Burning Man Project is an annual festal gathering in the desert, where people come together from across the globe to form a community known as Black Rock City. The annual …

The Conservation Of Three Hawaiian Feather Cloaks, Elizabeth Nunan, Aimée Ducey

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Purpose of Treatment

Sacred garments worn by the male members of the Hawaiian ali’i, or chiefs, these feather cloaks and capes serve today as one of the most iconic symbols of Hawaiian culture. During the summer of 2007 the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai`i, under the supervision of its conservator, Valerie Free, commenced a project to stabilize the cloaks so that they could be safely exhibited in the museum. This project was funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Over the course of the summer three of the twelve cloaks in the museum’s collection were …

Culture Brokers: Weavers, Photographers, Scientists, And Textile Experts, Kimberly L. Hart

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Preface

Today I will present the history of the founding of the Yuntdag cooperative in Orselli village in western Turkey. This cooperative is a member of the DOBAG Project, or the Natural Dye Research and Development Project (Dogal Boya Arastirma ve Gelistirme Projesi). DOBAG consists of two projects, one in Orselli and another in Ayvacik, both in western Turkey. By telling this story, I will show how “insiders” and “outsiders,” villagers, expatriates, textile experts, international dealers, and friends worked collaboratively to commodify a women’s heritage product and transform rural life in western Turkey.

Introduction

Harald Bohmer, who founded DOBAG in …

“I’Ve Got A Feeling We’Re Not In Kansas, Anymore:” Cross-Cultural Design In Peruvian Connection’S Textiles, Margarete Ordon

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Peruvian Connection is a high-end clothing, mail-order catalog company that has built its reputation on clothes made from finely crafted textiles in luxury fibers. The company appropriates elements from various textile practices and fuses them with Western fashion. The company simultaneously stresses distance and connection, colonization and celebration. We cannot simply locate the company in the rural Kansas town in which the corporate headquarters are based. Rather, this company straddles multiple geographic, temporal, and cultural locations, while simultaneously trying to ground its products in Peru. But we’re not in Kansas anymore, and we’re not in Peru, either.

I have chosen …

Atlas Today: Patterns Of Production, Bazaars And Bloomingdales Uzbekistan And Xinjiang, China, Mary M. Dusenbury

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In nineteenth century courts of the khanates and oasis cities of Central Asia, rulers, wealthy merchants and other well-to-do men and women wore boldly patterned warp-ikat and ikat velvet robes, often stunning in their patterning and variety. Nineteenth century ikat costumes and other textiles are well documented in private and museum collections today and have been the focus of considerable attention by collectors, dealers, and scholars since the 1970s. This robe is from a Turkish collection of Central Asian ikats given to the Textile Museum in Washington D.C. in 2005 by the collector Murad Megalli (Fig. 1).

Nineteenth century ikat …

The Cloud Brocade And Yangzhou, Ying Wang

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The cloud brocade, yunjin, is a unique production of Nanjing. The royal court had monopolized this kind of textile during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. The incredibly rich textures and fantastic designs of the so-called cloud brocade fascinate people even today. The textiles studied in this paper are from the collections of the Research Institute of Yunjin at Nanjing. This research institute has been working on preservation and excellence for the cloud brocade in its classical style and technique.

Yunjin is the only kind of textile of China that cannot be replaced by modern weaving machines; in present-day …

The System And The Development Of Contemporary Quiltmaking In Japan, Nao Nomura

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

Within just 30 years of the first introduction of American quilts to Japan, quiltmaking has become one of the most popular forms of needlework among Japanese women. It is estimated that there are now 2 to 3 million quiltmakers in Japan, which is one of the world’s largest quilt populations. Unlike American quiltmakers, who often learn to quilt through informal practice with friends, families or local communities and by attending short-term workshops, many Japanese quiltmakers learn quiltmaking within an established organizational structure that administers teaching and certification programs.

This paper examines Japan’s unique approach to teaching quiltmaking through the …

The Quilt Index: Communicating Stories In The Stitches, Mary Worrall, Marsha Macdowell, Justine Richardson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

During the last third of the twentieth century, a revival of quiltmaking occurred throughout the world along with a concurrent emergence of quilts as a focus of documentation and study. The rise of the feminist art movement in the 1960s and a heightened national interest in American history spawned by the nation’s bicentennial celebration in 1976 paved the way for a burst of interest in historical and contemporary American traditions, women’s artistic contributions, crafts in general and quiltmaking in particular. Millions of individuals began making quilts, an art form that had languished after World War II. By 2006, there were …

Embellishments Of The Alaska Native Gut Parka, Fran Reed

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Dealing with the various and extreme weather conditions in Alaska is a serious matter. Coastal Native Alaskans have been surviving in these severe environments for millennia. Without a local general store in which to buy a nice rain slicker, one must be resourceful with what is available. Between the hot summers and frigid winters are the transition seasons when it rains. Bird skins and fish skins were used extensively to make raincoats but it is the gut skin parka that proved so universal along the coast of Alaska (Fig. 1). From village to village different preparations, stitching methods and artistic …

Silent Needles, Speaking Flowers: The Language Of Flowers As A Tool For Communication In Women’S Embroidery In Victorian Britain, Mary Brooks

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Secret Flower Language, Women and Expression

In the romantic minds of the Victorian’s with their interest in medieval chivalry and sentimental symbolism, an obligation to social etiquette caused extreme censorship of what was considered appropriate conversation. This combination created a society that utilized and applied symbolic meanings of objects to express what otherwise could not be spoken. The Victorians followed upon the interest in botany and the natural world developed by the educated and leisure classes of England in the mid-18th century. They continued this interest, which developed into a fascination with the study of horticulture, botany and gardening. …

Acknowledgments, Pat Hickman

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Tom Klobe and Reiko Brandon deserve our very special thanks for the organization of such a splendid symposium, which indeed exceeded our expectations and goals. Thanks are also due to the Hawaii Organizing Committee who worked so hard to make available both Hawaii’s rich cultural heritage and its creative involvement today, as expressed through textiles. The participation and contribution of more than thirty museums, arts, and cultural organizations to the theme, “Textiles as Cultural Expressions”, celebrated Hawaii’s rich and diverse cultural heritage. The textile community in Honolulu came together as never before and the city and state responded with welcoming …

Author Biographies

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Author Biographies A-Z

Copyright And Disclaimer

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Copyright and Disclaimer

Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America, Inc.© 2009, Textile Society of America, Inc. ISBN 0-9645106-7-7

Copyright of individual papers remains with each author. All rights reserved. Published 2009. Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written permission from the Textile Society of America. Students and researchers wishing to cite the work of specific authors are encouraged to communicate directly with those individuals as many of these papers represent work in progress. …

Introduction, Reiko Brandon, Tom Klobe

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Aloha and Welcome

The Hawai‘i Organizing Committee for the11th Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America and the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel extend Hawai‘i’s fabled aloha to scholars, artists, museum and gallery professionals, educators, and textile enthusiasts from around the world.

Honolulu, the cosmopolitan capital of the state of Hawai‘i, is a meeting place of Western, Asian, and Pacific cultures, languages, and arts. Hawai‘i’s rich international diversity provides an appropriate site for discourse on the symposium theme Textiles as Cultural Expressions.

We are delighted that the symposium program is strongly international with presenters from East and Southeast Asia, the …