Art and Design Commons^™

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 …

Table Of Contents

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Organized Sessions and Presentations

Pre-Symposium Event: Writing with Thread Colloquium

Microcosm of a Textile World: A Close Examination of Material Culture of the Miao People in Guizhou, China

Old Fabrics, Scented Textiles, Changing Values

Mediation and Negotiation of Textiles

Emblematic Power of Textiles

Archaeological Textiles

Beyond the Tradition: Extraordinary Textiles from the Southern Andes, Peru, Bolivia, Chile

Development and Tradition

Notes from Uzbekistan

Textiles and Identity

Walking A Line: Gps And Satellite Technologies As Narratives, Ruth Scheuing

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

Over the last year I have been using a GPS (Global Positioning System) device to track my trips as drawings and a personal narrative. These lines form patterns with many variations. My recent Jacquard weavings were records of satellite images of the earth, received through the process of ‘remote sensing’, performed by a machine, instructed in this task. This presentation will briefly describe GPS and satellite technologies and discuss how these different ideas link up with my earlier work as an artist.

Walking as a conceptual practice has an interesting history. It deals with a process rather than a …

Omoshirogara Textile Design And Children’S Clothing In Japan 1910-1930, Jacqueline M. Atkins

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textiles provide excellent visual canvases for the presentation of new cultural values and ideas, and the traditional clothing of Japan, which encompasses a kimono’s individuality in its surface design, offers an ideal example. The early 20th century in Japan was a culturally and technologically expansive period in which changing societal trends and mores were reflected in textile designs that presented a visual compendium of the ‘modern.’ These designs, termed omoshirogara (interesting designs), mirrored contemporary popular culture and captured the essence of a rapidly modernizing country.

These dramatic textile designs appeared in adult kimono, but the range of designs for children—especially …

Claudy Jongstra: Transmitting Craft Heritage Through Contemporary Architecture, Susan Brown

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

“.. textiles, so often no more than an afterthought in planning, might take a place again as a contributing thought.”

When Anni Albers wrote “The Pliable Plane” in 1957, she expressed a vision for an integrated, rather than decorative, role for textiles in architecture. Dutch felt artist Claudy Jongstra has realized that goal. In the past five years, Jongstra has created works for some of Holland’s most important public buildings: The Hague, the Amsterdam Public Library, the Rotterdam Kunsthal, The Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Center, and the Nijverdal City Hall and Cultural Center all prominently feature her felts, not as …

The Colour Of Women’S Culture: Natural Dyeing As Self-Expression In America, Japan, Norway And Australia, Karen Diadick Casselman

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Natural dyes are front and centre in academic and craft circles. The resurgence of attention is due to several factors. One is the popularity of natural dyes among European archaeologists and chemists who rely on dyes as an analytical tool for dating textiles. Scholars worldwide have developed a deeper cultural context for early textiles by studying dye origins, horticulture, early dye technology, and ancient trade in dyestuffs. Gender is now a prominent theme, as are ethical considerations, ecology, ethnicity, and aesthetics. Dyes have surmounted the art/craft debate because their postmodern applications encompass many disciplines. From agriculture to zoology, natural dyes …

Chinchorro Twined Shrouds, Vicki Cassman, Nancy Odegaard, Bernardo Arriaza

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The first inhabitants of the South Central Andes arrived to the Pacific coast of what is now Northern Chile and Southern Peru about 8000 BC. The early Chinchorro were fisher-hunter-gatherers that made use of two media for their artistic expressions, their own bodies and large canvases made from twined reeds and sedges. Mats and textiles were used for a variety of domestic and personal uses, including shelter, packaging and shrouding the dead. It is likely they were used as blankets for the living as well. The textile shrouds and stylistic mummification techniques employed by the Chinchorro culture predate pottery, agriculture …

Meanings And Messages: Quilts To Comfort The Families Of America’S Fallen In The Afghanistan And Iraq Wars, Jonathan Gregory

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Beginning in 2003, grassroots quiltmaking projects were founded in the United States in response to the deaths of American soldiers in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. The author conducted an oral history project involving the founders of three of these quiltmaking projects and other quiltmakers who were active within them in order to understand the meanings of making and giving quilts and the meanings of the quilts themselves.

Two primary sites of meaning were identified in the study: 1) the internal motivations that inspired quiltmakers to begin and continue participation in a project; and 2) the textual, symbolic, and personal …

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

Many of the approximately 30 ethnic minority groups living in northern Vietnam continue to wear daily a traditional dress that communicates their cultural identity and links them to generations of history. Based on field studies conducted in villages in 1999, 2005, and 2006, this paper discusses the dress of the Lolo, Pathen, Hmong, and Yao who live in the northernmost areas of Vietnam where travel remains restricted. Connecting textiles with ancient beliefs and practices, these studies document the continued use of: a memorial display of clothing along with ancestral drums during Black Lolo funeral rites; the celestial crown of the …

Perfumed Textiles, Katia Johansen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As a museum professional, I work with memories. And nothing is more evocative than scent, which is both fragile and powerful. Perfumed textiles and costume are a standard part of every culture, yet few have been identified, and virtually none have been preserved. Perfuming was traditionally used to mask malodors from use or from production processes like tanning and dyeing, for ceremonial reasons, or simply to create a favorable impression of the wearer. Perfuming methods included using incense, laundry aids, sweet bags and fuming pans. Unintentional perfuming also occurred, of which we sometimes get a whiff in our museum collections. …

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

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Cultural expression reflects the multi-dimensional environment in which an individual lives and works. Art and craft function as technologies within that environment. The materials used say who we are, and how we think and feel. The use of natural dyes expresses philosophy and intent. In my case, renewable resources (natural dyes) used in my art work connect me to horticulture. I grow many of the natural dyes I use and sell both dye seeds and goods dyed with Iowa-grown and exotic natural dyes. Using natural dyes also connects a dyer to the past and future. The historical connection occurs as …

Black Silk, Brown Silk: China And Beyond—Traditional Practice Meets Fashion, Abby Lillethun

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This one-hour discussion panel will examine bi-colored black and brown silk textiles called chiao-chou and shiang-yin-sa, (a.k.a. black gummed silk, Canton silk, cloud perfumed silk, gambiered silk, and by other names). Little known in the West, these textiles express cultural identities associated with a specific geographic locals where the required mud treatment can take place. Thus, the textiles have primarily been made in southern China in Guangdong province and in Southeast Asia in Thailand and Vietnam where Chinese immigration occurred. Since their heyday during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), they faded from use. The panel first contextualizes the textiles and the …

Analysis Of Two Chinese Canton Silks: Jiāo-Chou And Xiang-Yun-Shā, Shuhwa Lin

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This one-hour discussion panel will examine bi-colored black and brown silk textiles called chiao-chou and shiang-yin-sa, (a.k.a. black gummed silk, Canton silk, cloud perfumed silk, gambiered silk, and by other names). Little known in the West, these textiles express cultural identities associated with a specific geographic locals

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

The purpose of this paper is to make clear the socio-cultural meanings of woven textiles through a case study of making textiles from Tosa-washi which was already being made in Kochi in the 10th century involving two textile craftswomen of two different generations. Mey Kusakawa (1933-) and Yuko Isozaki (1978-) create paper textiles with the underlying meaning and rationale of recycling used paper and thrift long ago. From activities of these two textile craftswomen in modern times, it is clear that the change from paper to cloth has a role which connects areas and people, and brings independence and a …

Warp The Loom – Wrap The Dead Trapezoid Shaped Textiles From The Chiribaya Culture, South Peru, Ad 900-1375, Wynne Minkes

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Central in this presentation will be a trapezoidal shaped tunic and loincloth from the site La Cruz, Osmore Valley, in the extreme south of Peru. Their specific features allowed their identification to the Chiribaya culture, a poorly known culture from the Later Intermediate Period (950-1350 AD). The tunic's form was the result of inserting discontinuous warps, whereas the loincloth's shape had been achieved by varying the length of the warps on the loom. Reconstruction of both techniques was made possible by Minkes ethnographic studies in adjacent Aymara and Quechua highland communities (2000), where weaving is still considered the most important …

The String Or Grass Skirt; An Ancient Garment In The Southern Andes, Amy Oakland

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The string or grass skirt appears among the earliest known garments in the Southern Andes. Archaeologists discovered the skirts wrapped around Chinchorro ancestor figures in burials near the Pacific coast of North Chile dating to 8000 B.C. The Chinchorro people’s mummified ancestors included specific gender traits so it is clear that they wanted to identify the skirts as a female garment. Chinchorro men were equipped with leather loincloths and both apparently used twinned grass mantles, blankets, or mats.

Through time, these coastal Andeans developed an elaborate dress with enormous string turbans and pelican-skin capes, however the string skirt remained the …

Black Silk, Brown Silk: China And Beyond—Fabric Analysis, Margaret T. Ordoñez

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This one-hour discussion panel will examine bi-colored black and brown silk textiles called chiao-chou and shiang-yin-sa, (a.k.a. black gummed silk, Canton silk, cloud perfumed silk, gambiered silk, and by other names). Little known in the West, these textiles express cultural identities associated with a specific geographic locals

Mending As Metaphor: Contemporary Fiber And Cultural Change, Mary Babcock

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

My vision in curating the exhibition of which I speak, “Tattered Cultures: Mended Histories” in conjunction with this 11^th Textile of America Symposium is to reveal “mending” as a potent metaphor for cultural enrichment and transformation. The work reminds us to honor textiles as living — not historical— research tools, and to invites us to continue to locate contemporary concerns with issues of marginalization, colonialism and social justice as an essential discourse within textile arts.