Adire African Textiles

Six Yards Guaranteed Dutch Design–Vlisco exhibition at Museum voor moderne kunst, Arnhem

2012-01-22T04:48:00.001-08:00

from 29.01 till 06.05

“As early as 1846, the Vlisco company, based in Helmond, served the West African market with Dutch Wax textiles. From 29 January through 6 May, 2012, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem will present Six Yards Guaranteed Dutch Design, an exhibition about how Vlisco’s Dutch textiles became a part of various West African cultures and found their way into international fashion, the visual arts, and photography. The exhibition Six Yards is a tribute to Vlisco textiles: over a hundred years old, born in Indonesia, designed in the Netherlands, loved in Africa, and desired in the West. These colourful fabrics make their way to fashion shows in Paris, the markets in Ghana, and galleries in London and New York. The exhibition Six Yards focuses on all the relevant angles, from their presence and meaning in the work of artist Yinka Shonibare, to the stories in the oral tradition that have come from the fabrics.

Art, design, and fashion

The exhibition has been put together by the Suze May Sho artists’ collective, whose work focuses on the areas where art, design, and fashion meet. Through these disciplines, the collective makes a voyage of discovery through the world of Vlisco fabrics, the designs, and their often surprising significance. The exhibition explores the history of the textiles and their stories, touches on Dutch (post-)colonial history, takes a look at the differences and similarities between Western and non-Western cultures, and sheds light on how visual artists, like Viviane Sassen and Yinka Shonibare, as well as top designers around the world have been inspired by Vlisco’s textiles — right up to the Spring/Summer 2012 collection.

Artists, photographers, and fashion designers with work in the exhibition:

Yinka Shonibare, Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher, Wangechi Mutu, Fatimah Tuggar, Viviane Sassen, Lucy Orta, Hans Eijkelboom, Seydou Keïta, Andrea Spotorno, Meschac Gaba, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Collectie Arnhem, Harvey Bouterse, Acne, Marga Weimans, Dries van Noten, PetrouMan, Querijn Maurits Ver Huell en Vlisco designers.

Publication

A substantial exhibition journal will accompany the show, in addition to the richly illustrated book Vlisco Fabrics (in English), with text by Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, published by ArtEZ Press, and a publication about Vlisco edited by José Teunissen, part of a series of monographs about Dutch fashion designers, published by d'Jonge Hond, Modelectoraat ArtEZ and ArtEZ Press.

Store

For the duration of the exhibition the museum shop will carry Vlisco textiles that can be purchased in lengths of six yards.”

Thanks to the Africa Fashion Guide for the info.

African Textiles in Africaniste Art–an unusual case.

2012-01-20T04:27:00.001-08:00

Marché en A.O.F. signed J.B. Vettiner, 1931. [click all images to enlarge]. From Christie’s sale The Africanists, Amsterdam 1 July 1998. Oil on canvas, preparatory work for a mural painted in the pavilion of the city of Bordeaux at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris.

Although this is in most respects a typical colonial genre scene of no outstanding merit, it is unusual because of the detail and accuracy with which the artist has depicted the textiles worn by the participants. Moreover the textiles shown are in several instances extremely rare styles not well represented even in French museum collections. I am intrigued to find these cloths shown in this context and can’t help wondering if they have survived in an obscure French collection, perhaps in Bordeaux, to this day. The scene was clearly not drawn from life – there is no suggestion in the limited biographical information available on the artist, Jean-Baptiste Vettiner (1871-1935), that he travelled in West Africa, and the cloths shown are far too elaborate and expensive to have been worn by porters in the market. Gathering cotton was a frequent theme of colonial imagery as the postcards dating to circa 1910-20 below show.

So what can be said about these cloths ? The image below numbers the main pieces.

1. Wool kaasa blanket from Mali, of the lanndaaka type, with the central motif of the mosque, lanndal, woven by a maabo weaver. Shown wrongly worn vertically as a kind of hooded burnous rather wrapped horizontally. The kaasa lanndaaka below is in the National Museum of Mali, Bamako – see Textiles du Mali, Bernhard Gardi, 2003.

2 and 4. Indigo dyed cotton cloths with white warp stripes at the selvedge of each strip and coloured supplementary weft float motifs are typical of the Bondoukou region on the northern part of the Ghana/ Côte D'Ivoire border, where they were woven by Dioula, and perhaps Abron or Koulango weavers. The cloth below is on our gallery.

3 and 6. These are really obscure types, related to weft faced cloths woven in West and north west parts of Côte D'Ivoire by weavers who may be Guro, Mande or Dioula, working in a number of as yet undocumented local traditions. The Musee Quai Branly in Paris has a superb collection of related pieces, although unfortunately largely without much useful collection data. Search for Côte D'Ivoire in their textiles collection database to see more. They have the piece below as Senufo but that is unlikely as the Senufo learned weaving from the Dioula in the early decades of the C20th.

5. Also from Côte D'Ivoire this cloth is an example of a slightly better known but still rare style that we believe to be the work of Guro or Mande weavers. The example below is on our gallery now.

7. One of the more unusual types of Malian blanket, the arkilla bammbu would have been used as a prestige display hanging for a Fulani wedding and is most unlikely to have been worn at all. The detail below is from a cloth in the National Museum of Mali, Bamako – see Textiles du Mali, Bernhard Gardi, 2003.

8. This cloth has embroidered rather than woven decoration, probably the work of a Hausa embroiderer in the north of Côte D'Ivoire. I know of only one related example of this style on a man’s wrap cloth (rather than robes and trousers). Now in the Karun Thakar collection (www.karuncollection.com) it was acquired in Accra and probably collected in northern Ghana.

African Textile Resources on our website updated–part three

2012-01-01T09:30:00.001-08:00

Below is an excerpt from the section on important textile traditions covering Asante kente cloths:

Asante Kente Cloths

Kente is the best known and most widely appreciated of all African textiles, adopted throughout the African diaspora worldwide since the 1960s as a symbol of Pan-Africanism and Afrocentric identity. At the same time it continues to play a vital living role in the culture of its creators, the Asante (Ashanti) people of Ghana in West Africa. The story of kente is closely interwoven with that of the Asante Empire and its' Royal Court based at Kumase, deep in the forest zone of southern Ghana. One of the first accounts of Asante royal silk weaving comes from the 1730s when a man sent to the court of King Opokuware by a Danish trader observed that the king "brought silk taffeta and materials of all colours. The artist unravelled them ....woollen and silk threads which they mixed with their cotton and got many colours." Silk was also imported into Asante from southern Europe via the trans-Saharan caravan trade. Many kente cloths utilised silk for a range of decorative techniques on a background of warp-striped cotton cloth, but some of the finest cloths prepared for royal and chiefly use were woven wholly from silk. Although since the early decades of the C20th natural silk has been mostly replaced with artificial "rayon" fibres, the artistry of Asante weavers has continued to produce remarkably beautiful cloths.

Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I wearing an Oyokoman kente cloth. 1926. Vintage postcard, author's collection.

The cloths woven in the nineteenth century for the court of the Asantehene, the king of the Asante empire were probably the ultimate achievement of the West African narrow-strip weavers art. The raw material for this artistry came from Europe in the form of silk fabrics which were carefully unpicked to obtain thread which could then be re-woven into narrow-strip cloth on looms that utilised two, and in some cases even three, sets of heddles to multiply the complexity of design. The king's weavers were and still are grouped in a village called Bonwire near the Asante capital of Kumase, part of a network of villages housing other craft specialists including goldsmiths, the royal umbrella makers, stool carvers, adinkra dyers, and blacksmiths. One Asante weavers' origin myth recalls that the first weaver, Otah Kraban, brought a loom back to Bonwire after a journey to the Bondoukou region of Côte D'Ivoire. An alternative legend recalls that during the reign of Osei Tutu the first weaver learnt his skill by studying the way in which a spider spun its web. The spider, Anansi, is an important figure symbolising trickery and wisdom in Asante folklore. Away from the court cotton weaving supplied much of the everyday dress for the Asante people, in the form of striped cloths, mostly of indigo blue and white, until it was largely displaced by wax prints and other imported textiles in the present century.

Silk man's kente in the "gold dust" pattern, early C20th

In many kente cloths the design effect is achieved by the alternation of regularly positioned blocks of pattern in bright coloured silk with the more muted colours of the warp-striped plain weave background. Interestingly it is the background designs, the configurations of warp stripes of varying widths, that provide the basis for most pattern names. As might be expected in a culture so interested in proverbs and verbal wordplay there is a large vocabulary of pattern names still remembered by elderly weavers. Some of these names, such as Atta Birago and Afua Kobi, refer to the individuals, in these cases two Queen Mothers, for whom the designs were first woven. Others refer to historical incidents, to household objects, to proverbs, or to certain circumstances of the cloths use.

Kente cloth weaver, early C20th postcard.

Most designs are produced by combining two distinct decorative techniques. The first, supplementary weft float, involves the addition of extra weft threads that do not form part of the basic structure of the cloth. Instead they float across sections of the ground weave, appearing on one face of the cloth over maybe six or eight warp then crossing through the warp to the back, floating there, then returning again to the top face. Rows of these wefts are arranged to form designs such as triangles, wedges, hour-glass shapes etc. Asante weavers distinguish loosely spaced floats, which they call "single weave", from more densely packed designs that conceal the background completely and are known as "double weave." The second effect is to create solid blocks of coloured thread across the cloth strip entirely concealing the warp. Without dwelling too much on the technicalities, this effect is achieved by the use of a technical innovation unique to the weaving of southern Ghana, namely the use of a second set of heddles that has the effect of bunching together groups of warp threads allowing them to be hidden by the weft. The design of most kente cloths involves framing areas of weft float decoration within the narrow solid bands called bankuo. The finest and most elaborate examples of this style and perhaps the most spectacular cloths ever woven in Africa, completely covered the underlying warp design with alternating sections exploiting the full range of weft float designs between very narrow bands, producing a cloth named Adwinasa, meaning "fullness of ornament."

Further Reading:
Adler,P. & Barnard,N. African Majesty (1992) - illustrates a great collection.
Clark Smith, S. "Kente Cloth Motifs" African Arts 9(1) (1975)
Lamb,V. West African Weaving (1975)
Menzel, B. Textilien aus Westafrika (1972)
Ofori-Ansah,K. Kente is more than a cloth (1993) - influential poster with interpretation of pattern meanings.
Rattray, R. Religion and Art in Ashanti (1927)
Ross,D. Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity(1998)

Click on the image to go to our gallery of Asante kente cloths for sale.

Back to African Textiles Introduction

African Textile Resources on our website updated – part two

2012-01-01T09:23:00.001-08:00

An excerpt from the “African Textiles Introduction” section Types of Looms:

“Weaving, at its simplest, involves the regular interlacing of two sets of threads to create a textile. A loom is basically any kind of frame that facilitates this interlacing process. One set of threads (known as the warp) is fixed to the frame, while the second set (the weft) is manipulated in between one or more warps in an under/over fashion. Almost all looms have some means of separating alternate warps to speed up this interlacing process. Generally this involves string loops placed round every other warp, allowing the two groups to be pulled apart, creating a gap (called the shed) through which the weft is passed. This set of string loops is called a heddle. Looms where only one set of alternate warps are leashed to a heddle are called single-heddle looms. Looms where both sets are leashed to separate heddles are called double-heddle looms. In an influential book John Picton and John Mack have argued that the clearest method of classifying the many different types of loom found in Africa is to focus on this fundamental distinction in the weaving process itself, rather than looking at essentially peripheral features such as the position of the frame, the width of the cloth woven, or the gender of the weaver. See Picton & Mack "African Textiles" (1979.)

Hausa men using double heddle looms, weaving 1cm width strips to be dyed indigo for Tuareg veils, Kura, Nigeria, 2006

Hand loom weaving has been carried on in Africa since ancient times, although in most of the continent in the unfavourable climactic conditions mean that very few textiles of any antiquity have been preserved. The earliest African looms of which any knowledge survives are those recorded in the wall paintings of ancient Egyptian tombs. For sub-Saharan Africa the picture is less clear. Although some scholars have proposed a variety of external sources for the main loom types only the Arabian origin of the East African pit loom is securely established. The two other main forms of loom in wide use are the narrow-strip loom (a type of double-heddle loom) and vertically mounted single-heddle looms, both of which may well been local African inventions. The earliest known cloths associated with the double-heddle loom are the large number of textile fragments dating back to the eleventh century AD found in burial caves along the Bandiagara cliffs in the area of Mali inhabited today by the Dogon. The great Arab traveller al-Bakri described seeing what would appear to be a double-heddle narrow-strip loom in operation in the Mauretanian town of Silla in AD 1068. For the single-heddle loom there are tiny fragments excavated with the treasury of intricate brasswork dated to the ninth century AD found at Igbo Ukwu in Southeastern Nigeria.

Whatever its origins it is clear that the distribution of the skills of weaving on the narrow-strip loom, along with the tailoring and embroidery of men's robes, owes a lot to the long distance traders that criss-crossed West Africa dealing in a huge range of goods, both locally produced and imported from across the Sahara. Most of these traders were Muslims, and the demand for appropriate and prestigious Islamic attire certainly helped to promote the spread of textile technologies. In some areas the majority of weavers are themselves Muslims, although this is by no means always the case. Until very recently almost all double-heddle loom weaving was done by men, but now, particularly among the Yoruba in Nigeria, it is being taken up by large numbers of young women. Although there are innumerable variations in such features as the seating posture of the weaver, the use or other wise of a wooden frame, the shape of the heddle etc, an essentially similar loom, known as the narrow-strip treadle loom, is found across almost all of West African from Senegal to Lake Chad and the border areas of Cameroon. The key features of this loom are the use of a weighted drag-sled to tension the warp, a pair of suspended heddles operated by simple foot pedals, and the weaving of a single long, usually rather narrow strip of cloth, which is then cut up and sewn together edge to edge to create the finished fabric. The other, less widely distributed, double-heddle looms are: Middle Eastern looms used by urban Arab weavers in North Africa, the pit treadle loom used in Ethiopia and Somalia, frame looms of European colonial or missionary origin, and various hybrid tripod and tetrapod looms found in parts of Sierra Leone and Liberia

The tripod loom, Sierra Leone, circa 1900-10. Vintage Postcard, photographer W.S Johnston, authors collection.

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African Textile Resources on our website updated – part 0ne.

2012-01-01T09:17:00.001-08:00

Over the holiday season I completed the redesign and updating of the resources section of my website. This now consists of six sections: a series of introductions to basic aspects of African textile production and use; pages exploring various important African textile traditions; a basic African textiles reading list; web resources and links; this blog with news of African textile related events etc.; and finally our archive of sold cloths. The front page of the resource section is here. This post and the following two give a taste of what is there. Below is my list of suggested introductory reading from the site ….

Sub-Saharan African Textiles: A basic reading list

There are other books that are easier to find but these are the most useful and reliable.

Bernhard Gardi ed. - Woven Beauty: the Art of West African Textiles (Christoph Merian Verlag, 2009)
Colleen E. Kriger - Cloth in West African History (Alta Mira, 2006)
Chapurukha m. Kusimba et. al. eds. - Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar (Fowler Museum, 2004)
Venice Lamb - West African Weaving (Duckworth, 1975)
Venice Lamb & Judy Holmes - Nigerian Weaving (Shell, 1980)
Vanessa Drake Moraga - Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa (The Textile Museum, 2011)
John Picton et. al. - History, Design and Craft in West African Strip Woven Cloth (Smithsonian, 1988)
John Picton & John Mack - African Textiles (British Museum Press, 1989, 2nd Edition)
Karl-Ferdinand Schaedler - Weaving in Africa South of the Sahara (Panterra Verlag, 1987)

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“Fugu for life” by Kofi Akpabli

2011-12-02T22:37:00.001-08:00

shared from Ghana Business News

“Batakari has spoken, who needs a suit?
From Fufulso towards Fulaniland
Fugu is king
Batakari has spoken, who needs a suit?”

The fugu smock is the most distinctive dress from Northern Ghana. The striking garment dates way back but the way men and women drape it in recent times reflect style and modernism. Also known in southern Ghana as batakari, fugu has evolved from a native wear to a recognisable fashion statement awaiting its turn at the international catwalk.

Fugu is a practical dress which provides protection for the body against both heat and cold. Compared to the kente fabric native to the Ashanti and Volta Regions, fugu is much rougher and a little less colourful. But its attractiveness and ready to-use mode makes it a must-have in everybody’s wadrobe.

Typically, the fugu gown is round necked, with short sleeves that have a rather wide opening. The smock is a plaid garment that is similar to joromi or the danshiki which originates from Nigeria. From the waist on, the dress spreads in a funnel shape sometimes reaching ankle length. The beauty of this shape is seen when men do the damba dance with the edge of the smock going round in circles.

The fugu smock usually has embroidery on the neckline with a small V-cut above the chest. It has two hidden pockets which, but for the embroidery will be hidden.

Unlike the kente cloth, the boubou or the Japanese kimono which are all traditional wears for special occasions, fugu is an everyday garb. Because it hangs loosely it is easy to wear and work with, while offering grace to the wearer.

The fugu fabric is made from cotton which is processed into threads by women, dyed and then woven into strips or stoles. The strips are about four inches wide and their thickness depends on the number of threads used. The weaving takes place in simple hand looms. To make clothes, a collection of strips are sewn together. This may be machine sewn or hand made.

Not all fugu fabrics are the same. For instance, there is the plain calico type which originates from the Upper West Region. In a way, this contrasts with the thicker, multi-colour patterned ones from Daboya in the Gonja area of the Northern Region.

The fugu smock is easily adaptable. Apart from the typical design described above, there are other variations which are more or less elaborate. A simplified version is the tight-fitting, almost-sleeveless one that reaches the waist. A related variation also flows up to the waist but without ending in the skirt-shape.

In contrast, there are the more elaborate styles such as those which come complete with the fugu smock itself, a covering gown and a pair of drawstring trousers all in the fabric. The trousers or pantalon have an exaggerated pouch between the legs. To top it up, there is a cap also in fugu. You may call this the fugu three-piece. It is usually worn by chiefs on ceremonial occasions.

It could be said that it is in the women’s domain that much of the innovations of fugu is realised. Women look trendy in the traditional smock design. They wear this with a pair of shorts or knickers sewn with the fabric. Then there is the fugu blouse which is worn over a cloth tied round the lower half of the female shape. On another level, it is fashionable for females to use the fugu material for kaba and slit. Finally, fugu can be made into one flowing dress from the shoulders to the heels. Of course, trust our ladies to crown each of these styles with a piece of fugu as head gear.

In Ghana, the fugu smock assumed great significance when President Nkrumah chose to wear it in declaring Ghana’s independence. Indeed, a look at the dais on the historic moment of 6th March 1957 would show that all his aides were in fugu. It would be naive for anyone to think that the dress code for that grand occasion was for nothing.

When the fugu dress is worn the wearer conveys a sense of conservatism and equality. Fugu looks good on both men and women just as it does for the young the old. The smock is also the mode of dress for both rich and poor.

Adopting the fugu conveys an ability to co-exist. It is a dress for all. Christians wear it. Muslims wear it. Traditionalists, too, wear it. In terms of occasions, it can be worn practically for any social event. In fact, in Ghanaian society it is about the only attire that can pass for formal as well as casual. For some men, there is nothing more attractive than wearing the smock over a neatly worn shirt and tie.

That the fugu fabric lasts long is without a shred of doubt. In fact, a piece of fugu cloth can be worn for life. Curiosly, as the fabric ages, it assumes one attractive phase to another. For some, the older and jaded the smock gets the more they value it. This is especially true for the elderly. When old folks say ‘my fugu has seen more tatters than yours’ it means that they are older and thus have had more of life’s experiences. In truth, one mustn’t be surprised by this attitude of cherishing a worn out piece of clothing. The practice is only similar to how the youth adore and flaunt worn-out jeans. It is the same old vibe.

On a more serious note, fugu is not just a piece of garment. The cloth serves as the backdrop for expressing communal codes. It is also one of the items that embodies traditional values. Often, symbolic patterns are embossed on the front and back. Common examples of these motifs are the heart or stars. Lately, ‘foreign’ concepts such as adinkra symbols are fitted in. It must also be noted that there is currently an introduction of brighter colours other than the traditional shades of blue, black and white.

Among the Dagaabas of the Upper West Region, the dress is known as ‘Dagarkparlo’ meaning ‘a Dagarti man’s wear.’ For Northern Chiefs, fugu is a mandatory costume. To some extent, the smock or batakari is also seen as a war dress. In this regard, it is adorned with protective amulets. For a man’s last respect, he is laid in state dressed in fugu. He is also buried in it.

Fugu, today, has become the basis for a vibrant traditional textile industry across Northern Ghana. From Bolgatanga through Tamale to Daboya young people, especially are actively producing to meet growing demand. The industry revolves around dyeing, weaving, sewing and designing.

Beyond Ghana, people of African descent are also taking a liking to fugu. Perhaps, in portrayal of Nkrumah’s ‘African Personality,’ many wear the Northern Ghana smock in America, Europe and the Caribbeans. Fugu is beautiful, modest and flamboyant. The good news is that it does not appear that it will be disappearing into history any moment soon.

By Kofi Akpabli

Kuba Images online at Smithsonian Eliot Elisofon Photograph Archives

2011-12-01T23:47:00.001-08:00

Some Kuba textiles in use as court regalia, 1970. These are just a glimpse of the wonderful set of photographs taken by Life photographer Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973) of the Kuba royal court in 1970. To see more, and many other remarkable photos, visit the Smithsonian archive here.

Saudi Aramco World : The Weaver's Song

2011-11-26T12:50:00.000-08:00

Saudi Aramco World : The Weaver's Song

Very interesting article.....

Fulani Woman by Monique Cras, Africaniste painter

2011-11-22T12:26:00.001-08:00

Watercolour, Femme Foulah – Dalaba, Guinee, 1939, by Monique Cras (Christie’s Amsterdam, 24/5/2000 lot 173. )

Monique Cras (1910-2007) is one of my favourite artists of the French and Belgian Africaniste school, notable for her sensitive studies of both men and women in French colonial Africa. I will post a larger group of images of her work soon. Click on images to enlarge.

Vintage postcard, circa 1920, publisher & photographer unknown, author’s collection. Fulani or Peul woman.

Adire African Textiles mailing list

2011-11-22T10:45:00.001-08:00

We are now doing a monthly mailing list that will summarize updates on our website, blog, any additional news, etc. If you are interested please follow this link to our website and enter your email in the box provided: Adire African Textiles.

Kuba: some early textiles and photographs

2011-11-20T04:22:00.001-08:00

In this post, to mark the on-going Kuba textile exhibition at the Textile Museum, Washington, we will look at some fine images of textile production and use among the Kuba, plus a couple of cloths from notable early collections. These photographs were taken by the Polish photographer Casimir Zagourski (1883-1944, )who lived in Leopoldville, in the then Belgian Congo, from 1924 until his death. They form part of a large series of images that Zagourski distributed in the 1930s as postcards and complete albums under the title L’Afrique qui disparait. These were published in a book Lost Africa by Pierre Loos (Skira, 2001). For more information on Zagourski see C. Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa 1885-1960 (National Museum of African Art, 2002). Click on any image to enlarge.

The earliest foreign visitor who was able to reach the capital of the Kuba kingdom was the African American missionary William H. Sheppard, in 1892. The large collection of artefacts he assembled, including the cut pile embroidered panel below, is now in Hampton University Museum, VA and is the most important source of information on Kuba material culture in the late C19th. See the Center for African Art catalogue Art/Artifact (1988) for more details.

The next important visitor to document the Kuba kingdom and its neighbours was the Hungarian ethnographer Emil Torday (1875-1931.) Torday’s extensive collections of Kuba and related objects gathered between 1900-1909 are now in the British Museum, London, and the MRAC, Tervuren, Belgium. For more information see John Mack, Emil Torday and the Art of the Congo 1900-1909 (British Museum Press, 1990). For some of Torday’s own photographs and an article see here. Torday collected the panel below which is now in the British Museum (Af1979,01.2675.)

New book: “Mama Casset”

2011-11-11T00:02:00.001-08:00

“African Studio: The photographs of Mama Casset (1908-1992) reflect a privileged moment for Senegal. They capture a bourgeoisie still distinguished by showy splendour where each detail was a mark of elegance…..”

Click the back cover below to read on.

Wonderful photos – Available now from www.revuenoire.com

Blue Notes

2011-11-07T04:01:00.001-08:00

If today people associate African fabrics with the bright colours of wax prints, lace, and kente, as recently as the 1960s indigo blue cloths were ubiquitous throughout much of West Africa. Indigo still dominates the stacked piles of vintage fabrics in my shop and still underlies many later developments in local textile design. Yet only a few quite isolated pockets of natural indigo production and use still remain in remote regions in West Africa itself. The personal journey of discovery that led her to investigate some of those often elusive surviving traces forms the subject of Catherine E. McKinley’s recent book Indigo: in Search of the Color that Seduced the World (Bloomsbury, 2011).

Catherine was the first person to buy a cloth from my first website back in the mid 1990s so we have been talking about indigo and I have been waiting to see this book for a long time. For me it captures both the rewards and the occasional frustrations of a long engagement with West Africa and its people as much as its textile traditions. A blend of social history, ethnography, travel, personal encounter and autobiography in a mix that is at times lyrical, at times less comfortable, it is a fine book that adds something unusual and distinctive to the literature on Africa’s textile history.

Also well worth noting for anyone interested in indigo is this new documentary film, available on DVD - Blue Alchemy: Stories of Indigo (www.newdealfilms.com) . If Catherine’s book draws our attention to the decline in indigo traditions in Africa, this beautiful film, directed by Mary Lance, looks at current attempts to revive indigo use and maintain important traditions both in Nigeria and in many other parts of the world.

Agbada, Riga, Boubou… Nigerian prestige gowns.

2011-10-31T03:57:00.001-07:00

For some sources this motif is a Sufi inspired spiral towards the infinite. For others it is just the moon. My focus today is just on the graphic beauty it displays. For front views and more details on these two early robes see our gallery here.

“Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa”–major new exhibition now at the Textile Museum, Washington.

2011-10-23T05:52:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the opening of this important new show and the accompanying Fall Symposium at the Textile Museum. This is a beautifully presented show, with each piece carefully mounted, sensitively lit, and displayed against a restrained chocolate brown background that does justice to the artistry and variety of superb Kuba textiles on view. The wider context of Central African raffia art was shown by the inclusion of a small number of textiles from other regional traditions (more are shown in the catalogue) and by a group of fine baskets, primarily from the Tutsi and Hutu peoples of Rwanda. The Textile Museum and the curator, Vanessa Drake Moraga, are to be congratulated on this splendid exhibition.

Below is the gallery guide. Click on each image for a larger view.

The exhibition catalogue is available from the Textile Museum. Click on the image below:

Finally there is a program of events to accompany the show. Click to view.

Weaving the Threads of Livelihood: the aesthetic and embodied knowledge of Berber weavers–new exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London

2011-10-11T05:44:00.001-07:00

“The Sirwa is situated at the junction of the High Atlas and the Anti Atlas mountain ranges in Morocco. The Berber weavers of the Sirwa are renowned for their wide range of textiles and their technical knowledge and artistry. In addition to embroidery and sprang (an ancient precursor of knitting), female Sirwa weavers master several weaving techniques: tapestry weaving, twinning, brocading and knotting, which they use individually or in combination. Since the 1980s weaving production has intensified, this activity occupying most of the households in the region and constituting a major livelihood option complementing subsistence agriculture.

The central piece of the exhibition will be a special 19th century cloak, the akhnif, (loaned by the British Museum) a garment unique to Morocco that has inspired the production of a new type of carpet in the 1990s, and variants since. In the exhibition, many of these richly coloured, densely embellished and painstakingly crafted carpets will be displayed. They demonstrate the dynamism and creativity of Sirwa weavers who exploit and continuously update their rich weaving tradition to produce a great variety of weavings for the international market. This will be the first exhibition dedicated to contemporary textiles production in Morocco.

Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to watch as the Sirwa weavers demonstrate their technical skills on equipment especially brought from Morocco and can even try their own hand at weaving. They will be given the opportunity to touch many items displayed in the exhibition, to handle tools (spindles, cards and beating combs) and textures (yarns and weaving samples) and to experience the carpets.

A one-day international conference on Moroccan textiles will take place in conjunction with the exhibition. The conference will explore Moroccan textiles in their historical and social context; contemporary Moroccan textile designers and artists will present their work and creations.”

I may have more information on this in a week or two when I have had time to check it out.

Asafo Company Banner–over 5 metres long

2011-09-16T03:38:00.001-07:00

Superb and dramatic Asafo company banner, made for the Number 2 Company in the village of Otuamkesi. The style suggests the banner was made around mid C20th, probably in a workshop in the village of Saltpond or Kromantse. Depicts dramatic battle scenes of decapitation and mutilation as a warning to the enemies of the Company.

These long banners are very rare - this is only the second I have collected. They were made as a public demonstration of prosperity by a wealthy Company, and the longest examples were many times larger than this. Condition is good, with minor losses to the border and two places where small tears have been sewn up. Details and more Asafo flags in our gallery here

“Congo” cloths and Ewe weft float pattern making.

2011-09-10T03:14:00.001-07:00

Elephant design from a fine 1960s example of a distinctive style of Ewe cloth woven from rayon with a large variety of figurative and geometric supplementary weft float motifs on a plain background. Motifs on this chief’s ceremonial robe cloth include animals, insects, birds, umbrellas, airplanes, forks, stools, leaves etc.

Unlike the designs on most Ewe cloths, the supplementary weft float motifs on this cloth and others of the same type are not identical on both faces of the fabric. Instead the full design appears on the front and only an outline on the reverse. This is because, rather than using the second set of heddles that group warps in sets of 6 or 8 threads to create the float motifs (so the extra weft goes over 8 warps then under 8 warps etc) the weavers pick out the design by hand, moving the weft over 8 then just under one...

Normal Ewe weft float pattern woven using second set of heddles:

Hand picked “one-sided” float pattern:

According to Malika Kraamer in her PhD thesis, this technique, which was developed by coastal Ewe weavers in the early decades of the C20th, is called "asidanuvo," meaning cloth with hand picked design. In the 1970s large numbers of rayon cloths with simpler, slightly larger motifs in this style were sold for export to Congo, with the result that the style became called Congo cloth by Ewe weavers.

This is an exceptional example, probably dating from around 1960, and in excellent condition. Details, size etc, and more Ewe textiles in our gallery here

Some more Ewe cloths on our gallery today

2011-08-26T05:40:00.001-07:00

This Ewe woman's cloth from the Volta region of Ghana is an example of the influence of Asante kente cloths on Ewe textile design. An Asante style border at each end of the cloth frames a central field in which figurative and geometric supplementary weft float motifs are scattered. Rayon floats and borders on a cotton ground. Cloth has a small frayed area along part of one edge but otherwise is in good condition. It dates from circa 1950. For details and other vintage Ewe textiles see our gallery here

Central African Textiles: Art and Cultural Narrative–fall symposium at the Textile Museum, Washington

2011-08-16T06:35:00.001-07:00

“This weekend-long symposium brings The Textile Museum’s fall exhibition, Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa, to life. Join renowned scholars and authors as they shed light on why Kuba textiles are considered among the most beautiful and influential of African art forms.

Emerging in the early 17th century, the Kuba kingdom grew into a powerful and wealthy confederation of nearly 20 different ethnic groups located in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Kuba are renowned as masters of the textile arts and surface design. The improvisational, abstract aesthetic of Kuba textiles captivated the members of the European avant-garde movement between 1910 and 1930, and its influences can be seen through modernism, fashion, fabric design, and the decorative arts.

Six presenters will place this artistic tradition in the context of Central African culture and the world of ritual the textiles were created for, in addition to exploring the lasting influence of their striking designs.”

Full details here

Very interesting program with well chosen speakers. I hope to be there…

Fante Asafo Flag–new update

2011-08-07T06:40:00.001-07:00

Charming old flag with a car and two men in front of a road block / barrier with a sign reading "Road Close." Background is felt. Good condition, minor marks. Dates from circa 1930 - 50s. Details and other flags in our gallery here.

African Headwear: Beyond Fashion–new exhibition at Dallas Museum of Art

2011-08-06T02:33:00.001-07:00

“August 14, 2011–January 1, 2012
Focus Gallery I

African Headwear: Beyond Fashion, an exhibition of approximately fifty objects from the Museum’s collection of African art, internationally acclaimed as one of the top five of its kind in the United States, explores the way in which headwear signifies status in traditional African societies. Often made of unusual materials, such as the skin from a pangolin (spiny anteater), wood and copper, various types of nutshells, lion mane, and human hair, African headwear can also include glass beads, plastic buttons, and ostrich feathers used in unfamiliar ways.

For example, a sacred crown worn by Yoruba kings in Nigeria is lavishly beaded and adorned with sculpted birds and modeled human faces. Tiered basketry hats worn by Ekonda chiefs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo feature hammered brass discs. Baule chiefs in the Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) wear velvet pillbox-style hats on which symbolic gold-leaf ornaments are attached.

Among the exhibition’s highlights, which also include significant works from local private collections, is a work from the Lega, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a man wearing a hat adorned with elephant tails would be recognized as belonging to the highest level of the association.

Another hat is something a Himba bride from southern Africa would wear on her wedding day. Made of soft calfskin imbued with butter and red ocher and decorated with iron beads, its large earflaps prevent the bride from looking in any direction but forward—toward her new husband’s home.

African Headwear: Beyond Fashion is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Roslyn A. Walker, Senior Curator of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and The Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Images:

Diviners headdress (nkaka), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tabwa, mid-20th century, leather, fiber, beads, and feathers, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of The Cecil and Ida Green Foundation, 1999.62”

Mangbetu hairstyle, Congo, 1958

2011-07-29T10:36:00.001-07:00

Vintage postcard. Just a beautiful photo, posted for no particular reason…..

An exceptional silk Asante kente cloth

2011-07-22T12:08:00.001-07:00

Superb and very rare museum quality Asante silk kente, early C20th, in the "mmeeda" pattern. Very finely woven supplementary weft float motifs in soft subtle colours on a muted green ground. Collected in the 1970s and in an English private collection since. Ross 1998:115 notes mmeeda means "something extraordinary" and cites Rattray (1927:241) "Asonawo mmada" - "the father of King Bonsu Panyin was Owusu Ansa, who belonged to the Asona clan, the first of that clan ever to be father of an Asante king." Details on our website here.

Some Asante kente cloths are woven from cotton, a very few highly prized heirloom pieces are silk, but the vast majority are woven from rayon, which was adopted by Asante weavers as a substitute for more expensive silk soon after it became commercially available, at least by the 1930s/40s. We focus as far as possible on rare silk pieces rather than the more readily available rayon ones (which can be picked up on Ebay for a few $100.) Careful attention and a trained eye attuned to the nuances of Asante textile design will be rewarded by a greater appreciation of the skill shown by those weavers working for Asante kings and chiefs. I assess the quality of Asante kente primarily on the scale and variety in the weft faced patterns - an exceptional example should have a wide range of motifs built up of very well executed small scale shapes rather than larger blocks of colour. Pieces of this quality are extremely hard to find and are poorly represented in museum collections, with the exception of those collected during the early 1970s by Venice Lamb (cloths now at the Smithsonian) and Brigitte Menzel (cloths now in Leiden, Berlin and Krefeld). Their relative scarcity can be attributed to the fact that top pieces were woven in very small numbers for royal use and were property of the stool rather than the individual ruler. To view our current stock click here.

West African Textiles from the Karun Thakar Collection now online…

2011-07-16T04:29:00.001-07:00

Men’s wrapper cloth, Abron or Koulango peoples, Bondoukou region, Ivory Coast, circa 1900 (Photo from www.karuncollection.com)

The Summer 2011 issue of Hali magazine (www.hali.com) features the textile collection of the British collector and dealer Karun Thakar, who was for a number of years an active presence in Portobello Road. African textiles are only a small part of a vast collection of cloths and artefacts, many of museum quality and international significance, from many regions of the world. Karun was an enthusiastic (and still sadly missed) buyer in the textile market of Accra for a number of years, and together with his purchases in Portobello Road and other places, this enabled him to assemble a remarkable African collection including numerous early pieces.

Over the last few months Karun has been posting a selection of pieces from each area of his collection on line at a new website www.karuncollection.com . Navigation on the site is slightly eccentric but a drop down menu at the upper right gives us an option to click on West African Textiles, bringing up four pages of thumbnail images. Some of these lead to single items, others to groups of cloths (click on the “read more” tag not the enlarge button.) Among them are several notable Nigerian cloths, an exceptional group of early Ewe and Asante cloths, and some fine early painted Islamic wrappers.

Woman’s wrapper with supplementary warp float designs, central Nigeria, possibly Jukun, C19th or early C20th. An extremely rare piece is an as yet unidentified style. (Photo from www.karuncollection.com)

Men’s wrapper, silk and cotton, Asante, Ghana, C19th. (Photo from www.karuncollection.com)

Men’s wrapper, cotton, Ewe, Ghana, early C20th. (Photo from www.karuncollection.com)

Men’s wrapper, cotton, painted design of Islamic amulets, made in Ghana by Hausa Koranic scholar, probably for a Fante chief, early C20th. See Hali #168 for another exceptional cloth of this type. (Photo from www.karuncollection.com)

Cloth in unidentified style, C19th. Catalogued as Mali, but I would suggest an example of Malian influence on the periphery of Ghanaian weaving, either in Togo or perhaps in Ivory Coast. (Photo from www.karuncollection.com)

An exceptional C19th Yoruba aso oke cloth

2011-07-13T03:30:00.001-07:00

This classic style of nineteenth century Yoruba aso oke cloth involved the alternation of a simple warp striped strip with a second design in which supplementary weft float motifs are laid out on a fine blue and white checked background. In an early example such as this the magenta silk thread alaari from the trans-Saharan caravan trade is combined with local hand spun indigo dyed cotton. In some cases, as here, there is one different warp striped design to add variety. Although the supplementary weft float motifs are largely based on the Koranic board shape (a wooden rectangle with an arrow head at the top, used by boys at Islamic schools as a writing board) in early examples as here the weaver plays around with variations on the shape. On C20th examples the design format becomes more rigid. This cloth can be dated by comparison with examples in the British Museum accessioned in 1900. It has a very slight pink tinge from a recent washing but otherwise is in very good condition for a piece of this age. More details here.

This is one of a group of rare Nigerian textiles we have recently added to our website. Click here and visit the Nigerian gallery pages for more.

Drummers, poets, and master weavers: rhythm and structure in the design of Ewe “kente” cloths.

2011-06-17T07:53:00.001-07:00

Some African textile scholars have remarked on what they perceive to be affinities between aspects of African textile design and the use of “off beat” rhythm in African musical traditions, for example in designating certain types of Malian blanket as “jazz cloths.” While these analogies are suggestive and thought provoking, and do seem to me to point in some degree towards important aspects of textile design in the region, as yet there has been very little attention paid to discussing these issues with either makers or consumers of particular African textile traditions. In this note I want to quote at some length from a recent article by the Ghanaian professor of literature Dr Kofi Anyidoho (“Ghanaian Kente: Cloth and Song” in The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/ Recent Art edited by Lynn Gumpert, GreyArt Gallery, New York, 2008) , that mentions neither “off beat” rhythm nor “improvisation,” but nevertheless appears to me to be an important contribution to this discussion by someone who is both an Ewe and a trained weaver.

“The first expert on kete weaving I interviewed was my uncle Dumega Kwadzovi Anyidoho, the man who brought me up and under whose tutelage I learned to weave. Now in his eighties, he is acknowledged as one of the most experienced master weavers in Wheta, with more than sixty-five years of experience. He is also a master drummer and heno (poet-cantor.) Halfway through our conversation I asked him to name other great master weavers he could recall. To my surprise, almost everyone he remembered was also a heno and/or a master drummer….

My uncle pointed out that this was more than a coincidence and offered two possible explanations for this apparent connection between the art of the master weaver and that of the master drummer and the poet-cantor. First, he explained that the weavers, whether alone or in groups, often sang to ease the tedium of long hours at the loom. Of greater significance however, is the fact that weaving, like drumming and singing, is a rhythm-based aesthetic performance. From the habit of singing songs composed by others, the musically and poetically gifted among the weavers would begin to try out their own voices and, over time, developed into composers of note. The rhythm maintained by the regular alternation of the heddles (eno) and the treadles (aforke), reinforced by the throwing and catching of the shuttle (evu), as well as the constant rhythm of the beater (exa), all provide a natural drive for the flow of song….

Beyond the aesthetic competence entailed in the application of the rhythm of weaving to the composition and performance of song, there is the more complicated factor of technical competence. Weaving is more than the application of a sense of rhythm. It requires considerable technical skills in design, possible only through a careful application of mathematical calculations combined with the architectural ability to construct organic shapes and forms from individual threads as building blocks. This process is not unlike that involved in the architectural design of the well-made song or poem.”

Click on any of the images above for a larger view.

To conclude, follow the links by clicking on any of the Ewe cloths below to view a selection of top pieces from our gallery. Looking at and thinking about the design of these cloths in terms of rhythm and structure does appear to enhance perception of the designs….

An exceptional early C20th Ewe “kente” cloth

2011-06-16T23:27:00.001-07:00

Although rather worn and missing a couple of strips this superb Ewe man’s cloth is exceptionally elaborate and finely woven and still looks beautiful even in its present condition. Virtually every available space on the blue background is covered by either weft faced bands or very varied supplementary weft float designs. This cloth would have been the masterpiece of a very experienced master weaver working for a wealthy and knowledgeable patron. Dates from circa 1900-20. Click the image to go to our website for a larger photograph and more details.

The 1/4 million euro weaver’s pulley….

2011-06-16T02:12:00.001-07:00

A Baule (Ivory Coast) weaver’s heddle pulley, collected in 1927, sold yesterday at Sotheby’s Paris for Euro 240,750.. more info and auctioneer’s description here

The tripod loom in Sierra Leone

2011-06-01T05:37:00.001-07:00

Last week I was in Freetown and finally had an opportunity to see in action the distinctive tripod loom used by weavers of the Mende, Vai and neighbouring ethnic groups in the eastern half of Sierra Leone and western parts of Liberia. This is the most widely distributed of a number of loom types that are found only in this region of West Africa (see Sierra Leone Weaving by Venice and Alastair Lamb, Roxford Books, 1984.) In the past this loom was apparently used exclusively by men, but as my photographs show, today there are also some women weavers adopting the technique.

Mrs Sia Nelson is one of a small group of around ten weavers whose looms are set up by the roadside in the small village of Grafton on the peninsular a few kilometres outside Freetown. The area was a major refugee centre during the recent civil war (1991-2000) and these weavers were displaced from their home villages in the interior and have chosen to remain. As the photos show they are weaving broad bands of quite thick cloth from machine spun thread. The simple designs are used primarily for sewing into men’s tunics, while some more complex cloths with weft float motifs are still sold at the small craft markets in Freetown and used domestically, primarily as a hanging at young women’s puberty ceremonies.

Although we can only speculate on the origin of this loom its structure appears to be a hybrid combining aspects of probably older single heddle ground loom forms (see my post here on a surviving ground loom tradition in Nigeria) with the double heddle operated by foot pedals similar to the narrow strip loom in use throughout West Africa.

Click on all photos to enlarge. All photos are copyright Duncan Clarke, 2011. Please do not re use without permission.

At one end of the loom the prepared warp bundle is tied to a small post.

At the other end some 20 metres away, the completed cloth strip is rolled up in a wheel attached to a second post.

The weaver, with his or her bench seat and tripod supporting the weaving mechanism, moves slowly along the unwoven warp towards the post as weaving proceeds. Once the post with the warp bundle is reached, a new length is unravelled from the bundle and the woven cloth rolled up on the wheel. The weaver returns the tripod and seat back to the post that holds the woven cloth strip, secures both ends to their respective posts and resumes weaving. This process continues until the entire length of warp has been woven. This aspect of warp positioning and the movement of the weaver as weaving progresses are very similar to that of the ground loom.

However when we turn to the weaving mechanism itself close similarities with the standard West African double heddle loom are apparent. The shed (the gap between the two sets of warp threads that the weaver manipulates to allow the passage of the weft) is formed using a set of two heddles leashed to alternate warp threads and joined by a stick that acts as a rocker suspended from the tripod. The lower end of each of the heddles are tied to a foot peddle, allowing the weaver to alternate the shed using the feet, leaving the hands free to pass the weft back and forward. Each pick of the weft is then tightened using a reed or beater.

We can note four differences from the standard double heddle loom. Firstly the weaver uses only the right foot, moving it from one pedal to the other as required (the weaver on the standard loom uses both feet.) Secondly the weft is rolled in a bundle rather than held in a shuttle as is the case on the standard loom. Thirdly the rocker replaces the pulley used by most but not all weavers on the standard loom. Finally the reed is not suspended from the tripod (as it would be from the frame of a standard loom.) Instead it rests loose on the warp and is manipulated using a side handle.

As a comparison the above image, a vintage postcard taken by the African photographer W. S. Johnson in Sierra Leone around 1900-10, shows the same loom type in use 100 years ago.

“A behind the scenes look at Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection” by Carleton University Art Gallery curator Sandra Dyck

2011-05-05T02:49:00.001-07:00

“Commemoration and Education wall”, photo copyright Barbara McCann, please do not reproduce without permission. Click for a larger view.

“In late 2008, I received an email from Barbara McCann, pitching an exhibition to Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) of African textiles drawn from her extensive personal collection. Fresh from its successful exhibition at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she was excited about showing the collection in Ottawa, where she and her husband Bill have long lived.

Like all exhibition proposals, of which the gallery receives many, we weighed this one carefully. The McCanns were no strangers to CUAG, having loaned textiles and weaving pulleys to African Art from Ottawa Collections, an exhibition we presented in 1994. Our lack of experience installing textiles (none of the current staff worked here in 1994) did give us pause, as did our desire to maintain curatorial focus (we usually show contemporary Canadian art). But we knew the collection was of excellent quality, we acknowledged there’d been too little African content in our program, and we guessed (correctly) that such an exhibition would be of interest to Carleton’s dynamic new Institute of African Studies (IAS).

The first task was to find a guest curator. We are lucky in Ottawa, in that the city affords us a rich range of scholars and experts in many fields. But we’re always keen to tap Carleton talent and so, on the advice of IAS faculty member Ruth Phillips, we approached Catherine Hale, a Carleton graduate and current doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Catherine, whose research focuses on the material culture of the Asante peoples of Ghana, accepted our proposal and soon began meeting with Barbara McCann to learn about the collection and over time, to select for presentation approximately 60 textiles from the more than 600 in the McCann collection.

The job of installation falls to the gallery staff. As the exhibition’s co-ordinator, I was preoccupied by the daunting challenge of mounting the textiles. We’re not the Canadian Museum of Civilization – we have a tiny staff; we don’t own mannequins or any specialized display furniture; and we rarely install works that fall outside the category of “fine art,” especially large, heavy and unstructured pieces of fabric. While in Seattle on a research trip in November, however, I saw a stunning textiles exhibition at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Their staff had invented an ingenious mounting system using standard-issue plumbing hardware that enabled them to “float” each textile off the wall. We couldn’t adapt the system to meet our needs, but it provided the seed of an eventual solution.

In December, I arranged for the transport to CUAG of Catherine’s selection of works from the McCann collection. Gallery technician Patrick Lacasse and I opened the storage containers after a 24-hour acclimatization period and examined each textile, discussing ways and means of installing it within the framework of Catherine’s curatorial vision. That first glimpse at the textiles was, for me, both exhilarating and intimidating; each work we unpacked was more wondrous than the one before it and we were anxious, as always, to accomplish the installation with utmost care and respect.

Conversation Pieces opened on Valentine’s Day and the exhibit ran until April 24.The show was dominated by three large montages that featured diverse textiles and articles of clothing that hung on dowels and suspended by wire from the ceiling, a mode of display Catherine saw as evoking the aesthetic of bustling African marketplaces. Other works were presented in wall-mounted and free-standing display cases, and on mannequins loaned by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. The gallery space was completely transformed; visitor response to the collection and the installation has been overwhelmingly positive.

With the help of Catherine, Ruth Phillips and IAS Director Blair Rutherford, I planned a program of special events to accompany the exhibition. Pius Adesanmi, winner of the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing, delivered a lecture that seamlessly mixed the personal, political, theoretical, sartorial and musical (Pius was joined by his fellow Nigerians in the audience in impromptu performances of two songs). A lively panel discussion featured Catherine, Barbara McCann and textiles expert Lisa Aronson of Skidmore College in New York. Susan Vogel, founder of the Museum for African Art in New York City, came to Ottawa to screen her film Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui, which was followed by an illuminating discussion moderated by Adrian Harewood of CBC News Ottawa. And Barbara McCann gave tours of the exhibition to many interested community groups.

I won’t soon forget the morning Barbara first saw the installation, then in progress. She cried tears of joy. Her reaction was a harbinger of the success of the installation, exhibition, and public program, which demonstrated to me in a fresh way the risks and rewards of venturing into what was, for the gallery’s staff, terra incognita.

Sandra Dyck is the curator at the Carleton University Art Gallery”

Reproduced from: “Carleton Now”

“Power and Prestige wall.” photo copyright Barbara McCann, please do not reproduce without permission. Click for a larger view.

A Dan Chief’s Robe at Sotheby’s 13 May 2011

2011-05-04T04:45:00.001-07:00

Lot 283A at Sotheby’s upcoming auction of African, Oceanic and pre-Columbian Art in New York on 13 May is this interesting robe, collected in Liberia between 1926 and 1930. The simple tailoring of the robe with the cut and folded pocket below the neck and the absence of distinct sleeves is characteristic of the area from Cote D’Ivoire through Liberia into Sierra Leone while the weaving is typical of Mande/Dioula cloth in some northern areas of these countries. Although there is some description of Dan weaving there is very little documentation of the patterns and styles they produced, so I am not clear whether the cloth used for this robe is the work of a Dan weaver or imported by a Dioula trader.

The estimate of USD 6000-9000 seems rather high for a robe that, however unusual in collections, is neither particularly early, nor in my view, of outstanding visual appeal.

Wearing African Textiles-part 6: an Ewe woman’s cloth

2011-04-17T09:54:00.001-07:00

Vintage postcard, “Fantee women”, mailed 1904. The Fante, who live along the coast of Ghana to the west of Accra, do not weave themselves, but wore a wide variety of textiles locally imported from the Ewe and Asante, as well as European and Indian made fabrics. Here the lady seated at front right wears a cloth woven by a male Ewe weaver in what today is the eastern Volta region of Ghana. This type of Ewe cloth with groups of three weft face blocks rather than two, seems to be more typical of the C19th. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Ewe woman’s size cloth, circa 1900.

Our current selection of vintage Ewe cloths is online here.

Wearing African Textiles–part 5: Yoruba Aso Oke

2011-04-17T09:40:00.001-07:00

Vintage postcard, circa 1950, authors collection. The two ladies at the centre of the photograph wear ikat patterned aso oke strip weave cloth. Click the photo to enlarge.

Ikat patterned aso oke strip woven cloth, Yoruba, Nigeria, circa 1950.

Our current selection of vintage aso oke is online here.

CNN African Voices features Nike Davies Okundaye

2011-04-12T23:45:00.001-07:00

Edmond Fortier and textile production in West Africa, 1900-1910

2011-03-30T03:25:00.001-07:00

Edmond Fortier (1862-1928) was one of the most prolific photographers and postcard publishers active in West Africa in the early years of the colonial era. Based in Dakar, he published around 3,300 different postcards between 19808 and 1910, with numerous re-issue series subsequently. His work is quite well known and more details and examples may be found on these websites: Centre Edmond Fortier and The Postcards of Edmond Fortier. Here I want to focus on aspects of textile production at that period as shown in a small number of his photographs. Click on any picture for a larger view.

The first three photographs were taken on a journey Fortier made through the Futa Djallon region of Guinea in 1905, and are to my mind, among the most beautiful of his images. Above is a group of women spinning cotton, below a man weaving and some women dyeing with indigo. Note the woman at front left of the dyeing photo who is beating the dyed cloth to give a glazed finish.

A second series, taken in the area of what is now Mali, probably 1905 or 1906, shows the stages of cotton preparation and weaving.

Ginning the cotton to remove the seeds.

Carding to align the fibres.

Spinning the cotton thread.

Weavers at work. Note the wheels of woven cloth strip carried by the man at left.

Below are the other weaving related images by Fortier that I am aware off. There may be still more that I have yet to locate.

In the above photo, captioned Dakar, a weaver is preparing his warp threads stretched out along the fence at left side.

Spinning cotton. Most spinning in West Africa was done by women, but in some areas men also spun.

A beautiful image of weavers shaded by a tree.

Looms in an urban Senegalese setting. We can note the different structures used for the Senegalese looms compared with those in Mali and Guinea shown above.

At this period French colonial authorities in West Africa attempted to finance their administration through a poll tax which, as few people had access to coinage, was also payable in cloth strips or wrappers (pagne.) The two photographs from Mali below give a glimpse of the scale of this process.

Finally, to give an idea of how woven cloths were worn, are four images showing aspects of dress in this region of West Africa 100 years ago. As is, albeit to a lesser extent, still often the case today, locally woven cloth was worn in conjunction with imported fabric for both ceremonial and everyday wear.

“Ibadan is sweet:” exploring a Yoruba adire eleko cloth.

2011-03-24T04:49:00.001-07:00

(click on the photo for a larger view. Image copyright Duncan Clarke 2011. Do not reproduce without permission.)

Adire eleko is a tradition of elaborate indigo dyed resist patterned cloths that flourished among the Yoruba people of south west Nigeria from the early C20th until the 1970s. Eleko means “with starch” and refers to the cassava starch hand painted on the cloth as a resist agent prior to dyeing with indigo, while adire is Yoruba for “tie and dye”, alluding to the earlier traditions of resist patterning from which this style was created.

The cloth shown above is a notably fine example of one of the classic adire eleko designs, called “Ibadandun”, which translates as “Ibadan is sweet or happy.” Ibadan, a large city north of Lagos, was, along with Abeokuta, the major centre where adire cloths were made. It was collected in the 1960s by Doig Simmonds, co-editor with Jane Barbour of the important book “Adire Cloth in Nigeria” (Institute of African Studies, Ibadan, 1971.)

In this post I will explore some of the designs that make up an Ibadandun, drawing on another publication by the late Jane Barbour that is still the most detailed documentation of adire designs (“Nigerian ‘Adire’ Cloths”, Baessler-Archiv, Neue Folge, Band XVIII, 1970.) Each completed cloth had a different combination of these designs, together with others, and individual variations on them. The interpretations that Barbour collected, a few of which are given below, seem to have been widely agreed in some cases, disputed in others, but are nevertheless worth noting.

Spoons and the pillars of Mapo Hall. Mapo Hall is a grand pillared structure built in Ibadan in the late 1940s.

Umbrella and cassava leaves.

Eggs. I have heard this called cocoa pods.

Hens, hedgehogs, divination board, roundabouts..

Chameleons, scorpions, hens..

To see this cloth and others for sale on our website click here

"Bògòlanfini, Patterns of Bamana Culture," exhibition at SUNY Cortland

2011-02-25T21:54:00.001-08:00

“An exhibition of the African artistic abilities that transform natural materials such as cloth and clay into spectacular artifacts will open on Monday, Feb. 28, in Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland.

"Bògòlanfini, Patterns of Bamana Culture," an exhibit that explores authentic mudcloth methods practiced by people belonging to Bamana Culture in Mali, Africa, is from the personal collection of Kassim Kone, professor of anthropology and linguistics at SUNY Cortland.

An opening reception will take place the same day beginning at 5 p.m. at Dowd Gallery. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be enhanced by a dance performance by the Africana Dance Ensemble. Refreshments will be served.

Three lectures will accompany the exhibit, which runs through Monday, April 18:

• Barbara Hoffman, associate professor in the Anthropology Department at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, will speak beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8;

• Tavy Aherne, visiting professor and art historian from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., will present at 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 31; and

• Kone will discuss his collection at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 6.

All lectures will be in the Dowd Gallery and are free and open to the public.

The project represents a collaboration between Kone and Dowd Gallery Guest Curator Jenn McNamara, assistant professor of fibers in the College's Art and Art History Department.

"In Bamanakan, bogo means clay or mud, lan by the means of, and fini or finis means cloth," explained McNamara. "Choosing the work for this show was rather difficult given so many beautiful examples. In the end, the exhibit is arranged so the viewer may see the wide variety of functions the mudcloth serves: initiation ceremonies, hunting garb, symbology and storytelling as well as the appearance of global influences on the cloth. Each symbol incorporated in the design has a specific meaning and importance."

Many local women have studied this technique, dedicating their lives to introducing the craft to the world beyond African borders.

"The renowned artist Nakunte Jara, whose work has been on permanent display at the Smithsonian, created many of the mudcloths in Kassim's collection that are included in the exhibition," McNamara said.

"The mud dyeing technique not only reflects a long history and cultural integrity but has also become a tool to propel Mali's cultural future and its place in the contemporary world," McNamara explained.

The most recent high profile use of mudcloth was its inclusion in the RED product line launched by U2's Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006 when Converse chose to make Chuck Taylor shoes from mudcloth. This highly publicized event began in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum and culminated at the Oprah Winfrey and Larry King Shows in the U.S. Kone was the anthropologist hired to purchase the mudcloth for Bono's RED-Converse mudcloth Chuck Taylor shoe project.

Kone grew up in the Beledugu region, believed to be the heart of Mali's mudcloth art.

"Bògòlan is a very important component of Bamana culture as this cloth is an essential part of most Bamana initiation and ritual events," Kone said. "I began to research bògòlan at a very early age when I worked as a research assistant to many American doctoral students. I began to collect mudcloth when I was in college. No two pieces are the same, even when dyed by the same artist. This explains why over the course of many years I have amassed a significant collection of mudcloths."”

Erykah Badu Yoruba Style

2011-02-23T23:57:00.001-08:00

From ARISE magazine, issue 11. Erykah Badu wears a vintage Yoruba aso olona cloth. Aso olona (“cloth with designs”) are woven on the upright loom by Yoruba women in the vicinity of the city of Ijebu-ode and were worn as insignia of office by chiefs and officials in the Oshugbo/Ogboni association of Earth priests and priestesses. The style dates back to at least the C18th.

Femme Daga, Mali

2011-02-23T23:40:00.001-08:00

Africaniste painting “Femme Daga” by G. Mahaut 1939

Vintage postcard, circa 1930.

Africa Through A Lens

2011-02-10T06:26:00.001-08:00

“Africa Through A Lens” is a new project of the UK National Archives, making available online via Flickr thousands of photographs of Africa from the former Colonial Office archive. The home page for the project is here.The collection includes a number of important images of Nigerian chiefs and kings from the late C19th and early C20th, a great range of views of everyday dress in many parts of Nigeria, a superb set of photos of Ghana, including those shown above, and original prints of some well known images of Sierra Leone.

Agbada: embroidered robe traditions in Nigeria and beyond

2011-02-09T06:18:00.001-08:00

Agbada is the Yoruba name for a type of flowing wide sleeved robe, usually decorated with embroidery, which is worn throughout much of Nigeria by important men, such as kings and chiefs, and on ceremonial occasions like weddings and funerals. The Hausa name for the robes is riga. Although today they are often still made from hand-woven cloth, the painstaking and beautiful hand embroidery that was used in the past is very rarely seen. Fine old robes have become family heirlooms passed on from father to son and worn with pride at major celebrations. In the past prestige robes were traded over vast distances and similar or related garments are found throughout much of West Africa.

Vintage postcard, circa 1900, author’s collection. (Click to enlarge) The Alake of Abeokuta was the senior king of the leading town of the Egba Yoruba in south western Nigeria.

During the late eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century the existing order of power in much of what is now Nigeria was upset by the impact of an Islamic jihad inspired by the Muslim Fulani leader Uthman dan Fodio. Across the city states of the Hausa in the North, down to the Nupe people on the banks of the river Niger, and as far South as the Yoruba city of Ilorin rulers were swept aside to be replaced by Muslim emirates. The main Yoruba power of Oyo was defeated and their capital city abandoned in the 1830s. The new Fulani rulers brought with them a style of male dress consisting of flowing robes and huge baggy trousers adapted for horseback riding. They also bought an Islamic tradition of "robes of honour" where embroidered gowns and the flowing turbans worn with them became badges of office for both rulers and court officials. Emirs and other rulers purchased the finest robes for themselves and distributed numerous others to their courtiers. An elaborate trade network developed, with both Nupe and Yoruba weavers and embroiderers, along with specialist tailors, cloth beaters, and dyers, serving the the main emirates. Rulers of other courts such as Yoruba kings beyond the reach of Fulani power adopted the same style of dress, and in the twentieth century the gowns became the accepted dress of important men across a large area of Nigeria and into neighbouring countries. The best robes were tailored from highly prestigious cloths, including plain white handspun cotton fari, beige local wild silk tsamiya (Yoruba name sanyan), imported magenta (wine red) silk alharini (Yoruba alaari) and handspun indigo-dyed saki (known to the Yoruba as etu.) They were embroidered with variations on two classic designs known as "two knives" and "eight knives". It is thought that the embroidery may have had a protective role with elements related to Islamic amulet design (see the previous post on “magic squares” etc), as well as a practical function in strengthening the pocket and neck of the gown. In recent years changes in fashion, the introduction of embroidering machines, and the spread of luxury imported cloths have led to a decline in the demand for top quality hand-made robes and the old skills of weaving fine hand-spun cotton and of hand embroidery are almost lost.

Detail of “two knives” embroidery design on natural beige wild silk ground. Click on the photo to enlarge. For a full view of the robe go to our gallery page here.

Vintage postcard, circa 1910, authors collection. A chief of Shendam in central Nigeria. As well as his robe he wears embroidered trousers of the style shown below.

Vintage postcard, circa 1910, authors collection. The Moro Naba, king of the Mossi people in Ouagadougou, now in Burkina Faso. (Click to enlarge.)

To visit our web gallery and view robes currently in stock click here.

Magic Squares: The Patterned Imagination of Muslim Africa in Contemporary Culture

2011-02-03T05:08:00.001-08:00

Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto

May 18, 2011 - Nov 20, 2011

Curated by Patricia Bentley

“Four contemporary artists explore the relationship of patterns, communication and spirit in conversation with textiles and symbols from the Museum’s permanent collection of Islamic African artifacts. Magic squares, known all over the world as mathematical games like Sudoku and Kenken, become carriers of powerful and diverse cultural meanings when they are painted, woven or embroidered on textiles in Muslim Africa.”

More Asafo Flags on our website

2011-01-27T06:45:00.001-08:00

More images, details and pricing here

Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection

2011-01-14T12:13:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I inadvertently posted the wrong description for this exhibition. Below are the details with the correct text, together with a photo of one of the exhibited cloths, kindly provided by Barbara McCann.

Detail of an Akwete woman’s wrapper cloth, Nigeria, from the collection of Barbara and Bill McCann.

Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection

Curated by Catherine Hale

Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Canada

February 14, 2011 - April 17, 2011

“Conversation Pieces explores the vital role played by conversation and, more broadly, communication, in the acquisition, understanding and exhibition of textiles from the McCanns’ rich and varied collection. The exhibition presents approximately sixty textile works and a wide range of garments acquired by the McCanns since 1970, in countries from Morocco to South Africa, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads (1998), a textile-based installation work by contemporary artist Yinka Shonibare, loaned by the National Gallery of Canada.

Whether created as emblems of prestige, to commemorate particular events or individuals, to offer protection, or to identify a rite of passage, textiles and clothing throughout the African continent are actively employed to communicate concepts of identity, history, and community. Highlights of the exhibition include an intricately-appliquéd raffia woman’s skirt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a cotton hunter’s shirt from Mali adorned with leather amulets and mirrors, a richly-embroidered cotton man’s gown from Nigeria, a Moroccan wool hooded cloak featuring a vivid red “eye” motif, and a three-part bridal outfit (smock, shawl and trousers) from Egypt’s Siwa Oasis region. Conversation Pieces highlights the many ways that textiles initiate dialogue about and between people in Africa and elsewhere. A catalogue is planned.”

At the kente festival, Kpetoe, 2007

2011-01-13T08:28:00.001-08:00

Click to enlarge. More images from the kente festival soon.

African Textile Exhibitions in 2011 by opening date..

2011-01-12T03:52:00.001-08:00

Africa Interweave: Textile Diasporas

Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida

February 8, 2011 - May 8, 2011
”Whether worn for work, masquerades, sacred ceremonies, or adorning the home or shrine, textiles are one of the most vibrant art forms on the African continent. Textiles have rich and diverse cultural histories. The exhibition will illustrate the continuity of textile designs and techniques from past to present, highlighting innovations, contemporary fashion and works inspired by traditional practices.
Art on display in the exhibition will be selected from the Harn collection, with many newly acquired works, including those recently commissioned from African textile artists. Loans from private collections and other institutions will also enhance the exhibition.”

Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection

Curated by Catherine Hale

Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Canada

February 8, 2011 - May 8, 2011
”Whether worn for work, masquerades, sacred ceremonies, or adorning the home or shrine, textiles are one of the most vibrant art forms on the African continent. Textiles have rich and diverse cultural histories. The exhibition will illustrate the continuity of textile designs and techniques from past to present, highlighting innovations, contemporary fashion and works inspired by traditional practices.
Art on display in the exhibition will be selected from the Harn collection, with many newly acquired works, including those recently commissioned from African textile artists. Loans from private collections and other institutions will also enhance the exhibition.”

Global Patterns: Dress and Textiles in Africa

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

April 13 2011 – January 8 2012

“This exhibition focuses on the accomplishments of African weavers, dyers, bead embroiderers, and tailors, and highlights continuities, innovation, and the exchange of ideas from within and without that mark dress and textile production in Africa. More than any other artistic expression, dress and textile production in Africa demonstrates the continuous links of the Continent with the outside world. Throughout centuries, African textile artists seamlessly and joyfully integrated into their visual vocabulary new design elements and new materials such as glass beads, buttons, and fabrics that arrived as the result of trade with Europe and places as far away as India and Indonesia. They added to or transformed existing traditions, and at times created new types of textiles and garments. Beadwork among the Ndebele peoples of South Africa and the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria, Kente cloth in Ghana and Togo, and Yoruba indigo-dyed cloths called Adire are among the highlights of the display.

Africans, in particular those living along the coasts, have been in contact with Europeans and other foreigners since the sixteenth century. Therefore, it is not surprising that clothing styles common in Europe also appeared early on among African elites. Certainly by the late nineteenth century, when many African regions had come under colonial rule, salaried employees who worked for colonial administrations, merchants, and increasingly the educated residents of growing urban centers were aware of fashion trends in Europe and began to follow them. They picked and chose inventing new hybrid styles, and always went with the times. Trade cloth and photographs help explore these aspects of African creativity.

The adoption of new ideas was not a one-way street, however: a small section in the exhibition demonstrates the way in which Europeans and Americans were equally intrigued by African dress and adornment. By the 1920s, African forms inspired fashions and design on both continents, part of creative exchanges that continue to this day.”

Weaving Abstraction:
Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa

The Textile Museum, Washington

October 15, 2011 through February 19, 2012

“The textiles of the Kuba kingdom are among the most distinctive and spectacular works of African art. Emerging in the early 17th century, the Kuba kingdom grew into a powerful and wealthy confederation of 18 different ethnic groups located in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. While they have fascinated artists, collectors and designers for over a century, this will be the first major museum exhibition in the U.S. to showcase the artistic inventiveness and graphic power of Kuba ceremonial dance skirts within a wide-ranging survey of Kuba design. More than 50 exceptional 19th- and early 20th-century objects will be on view, including ceremonial skirts, ‘velvet’ tribute cloths, headdresses and basketry from the permanent collection of The Textile Museum, the National Museum of African Art, and several private collections.”

Please do let me know if you are aware of others….

Fante Asafo Flags on display in Genoa

2010-12-31T00:17:00.001-08:00

As part of the exhibition “The Wonders of Africa: African Art from Italian Collections” that opens today at the Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, sixteen exceptional Fante Asafo flags will be on display until 5 June 2011. Drawn from an important private collection, this selection highlights the artistry of Fante flagmakers working in the first half of the twentieth century. Please do not reproduce the images below without permission.

There is an excellent publication “Asafo” by Federico Carmignani that illustrates the collection and introduces new research. Text is in English and Italian. Available from the publishers here.

If you are interested in collecting Asafo flags please take a look at my earlier post on real and fake flags here and the selection in our gallery here.

Ancestral indigo cloths of Saint-Louis

2010-12-11T04:17:00.001-08:00

Ceremonial shawl, Senegal, early C20th. (private collection, London). Click any photo to enlarge.

To mark the current ceremonies for the 350th anniversary of Saint-Louis, Senegal, I am looking today at one of my favourite types of West African textile, the intricate resist-dyed indigo shawls that were once a speciality of Wolof women in Saint-Louis.

Since the late C16th Portuguese settlers on the Cape Verde archipelago organised enslaved weavers from the Guinea coast to produce strip woven cotton textiles that were a vital commodity in the trading strategies of Portuguese trading posts along the West African coast. The most complex of these panos (pagne, cloths) had designs inspired by Hispano-Moorish textiles from the Iberian peninsular adapted to the narrow-strip weaving tradition of West Africa. They were the design forbearers of the Mandjak weaving tradition noted in the previous post. Most of the published literature on these textiles is in Portuguese but there is an important recent article by Carlos F. Liberato “Money, Cloth-Currency, Monopoly, and Slave Trade in the rivers of Guine and the Cape Verde Islands, 1755-77,” online here

	Af1934,0307.194, Beving Collection, British Museum. circa 1900.
	Rare view of a Cape Verde panos in use, worn at a batuque dance. Detail of a vintage postcard, circa 1905, authors collection.

The Senegalese indigo dyed cloths we are looking at here seem to have developed from attempts, perhaps in the nineteenth century or even earlier, to replicate these complex and expensive woven design using a cheaper embroidery resist technique. drawing on long established traditions of more simple tie dyed cloth patterning in the Senegambia area. Imported cotton cloth, often cut up into narrow strips for patterning, or with patterns that echoed the narrow strip designs, were embroidered by hand with intricate motifs. The cloth was then dyed in indigo, and as a final stage, the embroidered motifs cut away with a razor blade or sharp knife, to leave white designs on a blue ground.

	Illustration of embroidered resist technique. Click to enlarge. From the catalogue “Teinture, expression de la tradition en Afrique noire” (Musee de l’Impression sur Etoffes de Mulhouse, 1982)
	British Museum photo showing various stages of production. Af1934, 0307.351

The result of this laborious and painstaking work were some of the most beautiful of West African textiles.

	Ceremonial shawl, Senegal, early C20th. (private collection, London.)
	Ceremonial shawl, Senegal, early C20th. (author’s collection.)

Below are a series of early C20th images from vintage postcards that show the cloths in use…..

Mandjak Textiles exhibition in Saint-Louis, Senegal

2010-12-05T23:42:00.001-08:00

“Saint-Louis du Sénégal

Salle de conférence de « La Maison Rose »

10 décembre - 31 décembre 2010
Exposition « Pagnes … Panos »

Pagnes … Panos … est une exposition itinérante de textiles d’une tradition pluriséculaire appelés « pagnes Mandjak ». Organisée par Maï Diop, designer textile française installée à Saint-Louis depuis 12 ans, cette exposition fait l’objet d’un intérêt croissant des amateurs, collectionneurs et musées. Une sélection de 4O pièces venant de Guinée Bissau, du Cap vert et du Sénégal où Saint-Louis capitale de l’élégance est très représentée, a été choisie parmi la collection de l’organisatrice.

Cette exposition se distingue par la richesse tant au plan des techniques employées que de la finesse des pagnes : supports d’affectivité, de superstitions et de noblesse, ces majestueuses étoffes sont produites par d’excellents tisserands encore aujourd’hui.

Dans le cadre des célébrations de Saint-Louis, dont l’année anniversaire des 350 ans touche à sa fin, cette exposition est une invitation à découvrir et à porter un nouveau regard sur ces textiles africains : ils ont les qualités des femmes qui en dirigent la production : l’élégance, le dynamisme, la créativité. “

The Lamb Collection of African Textiles on-line

2010-11-30T07:21:00.001-08:00

Venice Lamb is a pioneering figure in the study and documentation of West African textiles. The series of books she published together her husband Alastair in the 1970s and 80s are still the only monographs devoted to most of these areas, and remain essential both for the wide variety of photographs and their recording of many traditions that have since evolved markedly or in some cases disappeared altogether: Venice Lamb, West African Weaving (Duckworth, 1975) – mainly covering Ghana; Venice Lamb & Judy Holmes, Nigerian Weaving (Roxford, 1980); Venice & Alastair Lamb, Au Cameroun Weaving – Tissage (Roxford, 1981); Venice & Alastair Lamb, Sierra Leone Weaving (Roxford, 1984).

The collection of textiles assembled by the Lambs is owned jointly by the National Museum of African Art and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Part of the collection was exhibited soon after the purchase and highlights of this may be seen in the small but important book by Peggy Stoltz Gilfoy, Patterns of Life: West African Strip Weaving Traditions (Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 1987.) A small number of the Lamb cloths are also online as collection highlights at the National Museum of African Art website – search for “Costume and textiles” on the Advanced Search page here.

More importantly for scholars of African textiles, it is now possible to access a large part of the Lamb collection through the main Smithsonian database here. Entering “Venice Lamb” as the search term pulls up 1563 records, of which 988 include photos online. The strength of the Lamb’s collection of Asante kente cloths is well known and most of the major pieces have been published, but I was interested to see a number of very fine small cloths, described as shawls or headtie’s. Brigitte Menzel also collected a number of these miniature kente in the 1970s but I have seen only one in all my years of collecting in Ghana.

Click on photos for larger views…..

	USNM#: EJ10570, LAMB: "POSSIBLE A SHAWL OR SMALL WOMAN'S PIECE...ASASIA PATTERN...OLD...OYOKOMAN SAMPLE. BELONGED TO NAN OKAI ABABIO'S MOTHER." 112cm x 59.3cm
	USNM#:EJ10594. ”liar’s cloth” pattern. 81cm x 37cm

Also of interest is a group of Manjak and Papel cloths from Guinea Bissau.

USNM#:EJ10109.
Wrapper, 185cm x 114cm.

For me though the most exciting pieces are three cloths unlike any I have seen before…..

	USNM#:EJ10227. Shroud. 219cm x 168c. Collected in Ferkessedougou, Cote D’Ivoire. RENE BOSER NOTES: "BAULE OR...DYULA MANUFACTURE. USED EVENTUALLY BY THE SENUFO."
	USNM#:EJ10375. Woman’s wrapper. 159cm x 104cm. Collected 1980 in Bafodia, Sierra Leone.
	USMN#:EJ11423. 233cm x 56cm. Collected in 1975 in D.R. Congo. Donor’s comment – “string net cloth, the function of this unusual cloth is not clear.” My own comment would be that surely this strip woven cloth must have been traded to Congo from West Africa.

“African Lace” exhibition in Vienna–some photographs

2010-11-24T05:23:00.001-08:00

Images from the exhibition “African Lace” at the Ethnology Museum, Vienna, from 22 October 2010 to 14 February 2011. Organised jointly with the National Museum in Lagos, where the show will also appear in 2011, these photographs are courtesy of the co-curator Dr Barbara Plankensteiner and are copyright the museum as follows: Photographs: Alexander Rosoli, © KHM mit MVK und ÖTM. Please do not reproduce them without direct permission from the museum. Click on any image to see a larger version.

There are also two videos of the show posted on YouTube:

Exceptional early Kuba cloth at Sotheby’s Paris

2010-11-11T04:24:00.001-08:00

Lot 7 in Sotheby’s forthcoming African Art sale “A New York Collection” to be held in Paris on November 30th is this superb early raffia textile from the Kuba kingdon in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Estimated at Euro 1000 – 2000 and measuring 76cm x 57, this piece is reminiscent of some of the earliest Kuba cloths from the British Museum’s Torday collection.

Wearing African Textiles–part 4.

2010-11-05T04:54:00.001-07:00

Chief Kai Lunda of Luawa Country, Upper Mendi, circa 1893. He was chief of an area on the border between Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Vintage postcard, authors collection.

Manding robe, C19th, author’s collection. These rare robes are discussed in Bernard Gardi Le Boubou C’est Chic (Basel, 2000.) Less than 25 examples are known from museum collections worldwide.

Wearing African Textiles - part 3

2010-11-05T03:51:00.001-07:00

	Yoruba aso oke strip woven cloth from Nigeria was widely admired in West Africa and was traded in large quantities to nearby countries. In this rare postcard image from Sierra Leone, taken around 1905, the lady at the right is wearing an aso oke shawl similar to the C19th example below.
	Very rare C19th wrapper cloth. Magenta trans-Saharan silk is used for both warp and weft in the plain strips making the cloth very lightweight. These strips alternate with magenta silk weft float patterns on a fine blue and white check ground. This is an early example of a style of cloth that continued to be made into the 1950s. More information on this cloth in our online gallery here

New book: African Wax Print, A Textile Journey by Magie Relph & Robert Irwin

2010-10-31T02:55:00.001-07:00

Magie Relph is a quilter who travels widely in Africa and together with Robert Irwin, runs the very wonderful online African Fabric Shop . This entertaining and beautifully illustrated new book chronicles their encounters with African wax print and their research with A Brunnschweiler and Co (ABC) into both old and new designs. A closing section illustrates a selection of quilts inspired by African prints.

The book is available direct from the authors at the African Fabric Shop.

New book: “Contemporary African Fashion”

2010-10-25T01:06:00.001-07:00

“Contemporary African Fashion,” Edited by Suzanne Gott and Kristyne Loughran (Indiana University Press, 2010). Important new book with chapters by most of the leading scholars in the growing field of research into fashion in Africa and the African diaspora.

Some more vintage Yoruba adire cloths from Nigeria

2010-10-22T04:06:00.001-07:00

Today we have updated the selection of vintage adire cloths from the Yoruba speaking region of Nigeria on our website. Adire means tie and dye, although many of the hand made patterns were created using painted on cassava starch to resist the indigo dye. Details of descriptions, sizes and prices on our gallery here or visit us in London…..

New book: “Asafo” by Federico Carmignani

2010-10-17T07:26:00.001-07:00

With text in both Italian and English this brief (48 pages) new book written by Federico Carmignani introduces the Asafo flag tradition in an article illustrated with both archival images and field photographs, then presents a selection of beautiful, well chosen, examples. It is an important addition to the small literature on Fanti Asafo flags. Available from the publisher here.

Some more vintage textiles from Francophone West Africa

2010-10-17T07:03:00.001-07:00

Today we have updated the selection of vintage cloths from Cote D’Ivoire, Mali, Togo etc on our website. Details of descriptions, sizes and prices on our gallery here or visit us in London…..

Some more vintage Asante silk kente

2010-10-14T04:19:00.001-07:00

Today we have updated the selection of vintage Asante silk kente cloths on our website. Details of descriptions, sizes and prices on our gallery here or visit us in London…..

Some more vintage Ewe cloths

2010-10-13T05:54:00.001-07:00

Today we have updated the selection of vintage Ewe cloths on our website. Details of descriptions, sizes and prices on our gallery here or visit us in London…..

“Nigerian Artistry” – availability update

2010-10-12T02:59:00.001-07:00

I have just heard from the publishers that the book is now being distributed through amazon.co.uk So order your copy now !

New book: “Nigerian Artistry” by Pat Oyelola

2010-10-11T10:44:00.001-07:00

Dr Pat Oyelola is a much loved figure in Nigerian art circles who taught for some years at the University of Ibadan and has written numerous articles and books on aspects of Nigerian art. Whilst doing my research and on subsequent occasions I was one of many visiting students over the years who have benefitted from her guidance, kindness and hospitality. Her latest and most substantial book is a 300 page survey that ranges across the whole range of Nigerian arts, from body decoration and hairdressing, to textiles, beadwork, pottery, calabash decoration basketry, sculpture in wood and metal, and the impact of these traditions on contemporary artists. The textiles section runs for over 70 pages and presents a local perspective on weaving, dyeing, embroidery, and dress forms over the years from someone who has actively participated in wearing many of the products as well as studying them over several decades. I particularly like the way in which continuities between present day practice and the art forms of the past is seen as a taken for granted aspect of Nigerian artistic life rather than as a problematic issue or a radical break with traditions.

As with all to many Nigerian publications tracking down this book outside Nigeria may be difficult. It is published by Mosuro Publishers in Ibadan at mosuro@skannet.com but as yet I have not got any information on international distribution.

Africa in fashion (again)

2010-09-19T01:32:00.001-07:00

As fashion week rolls around once again certain types of African textile are very visible and ‘all things’ Africa seem once more to be in vogue. For a look at these developments that goes beyond the usual superficial celebration see:

African Nostalgia: Between Authenticity and Fad

And for an unusually extravagant illustration see the current issue of the online magazine Ghubar

Mumuye Weaving: to Zing in search of langtang

2010-09-04T05:28:00.001-07:00

The Mumuye people live south of the Benue river in a remote hilly region of Taraba and Adamawa states in eastern Nigeria, close to the border with Cameroun. They are well known to African art lovers as the source of some remarkable schematic wood sculptures. They are also, following research by Venice Lamb in the 1970s, noted in the literature on African textiles as practitioners of an archaic form of weaving known as the “ground loom.” (Lamb & Holmes, Nigerian Weaving, 1980:141)

Variants of this ancient loom were used by nomadic Berber women in North Africa to weave woollen strips to form tents, and by some women in Madagascar but in West Africa its use was by the C20th confined to the mountains of north west Cameroun and to the Mumuye and perhaps also a few of the Tiv peoples in Nigeria.

Last month I took advantage of a lengthier than usual visit to Nigeria to investigate whether Mumuye men were still weaving using this technique and if possible to witness the loom in action. After a two day drive east across the so-called Middle Belt of the country we reached Yola, the capital of Adamawa state. The following day we set off early and when we arrived at the small town of Zing were lucky enough to have got there on the day of the weekly market.

Under a shade tree in a quiet corner of the market were a group of weavers sitting behind the rolled up bundles of cloth, exactly as Lamb had described almost 40 years earlier.

The weavers each had two or three rolled up bundles of cloth on the ground at their feet. Prospective buyers inspected the cloths carefully, unrolling the long strips of fabric across the open space in front of the vendors. Each cloth is made up of a single strip almost 6 metres in length of handspun local cotton, so loosely woven that it was almost like a net but given weight by the thickness of the fibres used. Most were about 40cm wide with a simple combination of broad warp and weft stripes in a few shades of black and brown. A few were narrower, with a 30cm width, and these had an even simpler pattern of a few narrow warp stripes close to each selvedge (edge.) This basic homespun cloth, called langtang, is the only output of Mumuye weavers. Although it is sometimes cut up and sewn together to form a wrapper cloth worn for local dance costumes, the primary use of langtang, and the reason for the continued survival of this form of textile is as a vital component of funerary rites. Each adult in a Mumuye community is obliged to contribute a strip of langtang whenever a funeral takes place. Some are used to form a shroud, while others may be retained by the family for future use.

The following day a 45 minute motorbike ride from a checkpoint on the road about 10km outside Zing brought us to meet one of the weavers at his family compound in a hilly area called Dansa Bargar.

Under a tree at the edge of the compound the permanent frame of the loom consisted only of four wooden stakes set in two pairs about 6 metres apart. The working parts including the partly woven strip of cloth were brought out from a house and setup within a few minutes.

The warp threads are simple tied to two sticks that can be braced behind the pairs of uprights forming the loom frame at each end, with sufficient tension to hold it in place about 20cm off the ground.

Small wooden tripods at either side of the warp support the single floating heddle – a pair of sticks from which loops of thick yarn leash alternate warp threads. The weaver sits astride the already woven section of cloth. Lifting the heddle forms the shed (gap between the two sets of warps) through which he passes the weft thread. Together with a larger crossbar and a flat swordstick he then creates a countershed (raising the unleashed alternate warps) to pass back the weft. The seated weaver moves along the warp as weaving progresses.

The cotton used to weave this cloth is grown among the corn and other crops surrounding the compound, carded by the women of the family, and spun by both men and women. Local plant and earth based dyes, including indigo, are used to create the limited range of colours needed.

[Thanks are due to the weaver, Mr Abubakar Sahadu, to our two impromptu local guides, David and “the Honourable Daudu” and to Charles Osobu for his driving and company throughout the trip.]

Post-minimalist Composition and African Textiles ?

2010-08-03T23:57:00.001-07:00

From an interview with the South African born composer Kevin Volans who will be featured at this years Edinburgh Festival. Entire interview here

"Progress is not a word that applies: there are no themes, no motifs, no development, no repetition and no recapitulation. It’s a non-developmental piece in that it operates in the same kind of space from beginning to end."

That could suggest minimalism, but Volans is not a minimalist composer; though there are some pieces in his oeuvre, in some of his 10 string quartets or the utterly mesmerising, which might seduce the innocent ear into thinking it was hearing a form of minimalism.

So with the litany of symphonic elements absent from the score, is the music of his new piece going to be static? "No. The images change; the focus changes. It might focus more on a complex texture, then on tone colour, then more on some kind of rhythmic structure."

The seminal inspiration behind the construction of the piece doesn’t lie in music at all. "It’s akin more to African textiles than musical models. They were the reason I had to give up serialism as a way of ordering music. They are very virtuosic textiles, woven by the men then embroidered by the women.

"They use a very dramatic method of contrasting different forms of patterning, from left to right, right to left, down to up and up to down; and they also use broken patterning. So the patterns are irregular, and there is great virtuosity in their use of irregularity within the patterning."

There is a well established literature on “offbeat” patterning in African textiles and possible links to music but Volan’s comments may provide a further dimension. He seems to be talking here about Kuba cloths from Congo but his insights are equally applicable to many other types of African textile design. Below I have posted a few of our own “post minimal” pieces. These are all sold but if this type of cloth is of interest please contact me. Click on the photos for larger images.

	Ewe woman’s cloth, Ghana, circa 1920-50
	Abron/Koulango womans cloth, Bondoukou region, Cote D’Ivoire, circa 1920-50
	Asante or Ewe woman’s cloth, Ghana, circa 1920-50
	Detail of Yoruba woman’s cloth, Nigeria, circa 1920s
	Abron/Koulango womans cloth, Bondoukou region, Cote D’Ivoire, circa 1920-50
	Detail of Asante men’s kente cloth, Ghana, circa 1920s

Wearing African Textiles – part two

2010-08-01T05:56:00.001-07:00

Postcard captioned “The members of the Gold Coast cabinet, 17 July 1956.” (Department of Information Services, Accra) (Author’s collection.) Click on photos for larger view.

Silk Asante kente, 1950s. For more Asante kente we have for sale click here.

New address for our website – adireafricantextiles.com

2010-07-30T12:10:00.001-07:00

After almost 15 years online our old web address at adire.clara.net will no longer function. Over the past ten days I have transferred the entire site to www.adireafricantextiles.com . Please revise any bookmarks or links you have been kind enough to make to the site. Any of you who have not yet seen our online galleries of vintage African textiles and associated information resources are invited to take a look and we welcome any comments.

“Under African Skies” – quilting exhibition in York

2010-07-01T23:19:00.001-07:00

A Quilt and Textile Exhibition curated by Magie Relph for The Quilt Museum and Gallery in York, 10 July to 16 October 2010 – features quilts made from and inspired by African fabrics.

“African Odyssey III by Janice Gunner, UK. This quilt was inspired by a present from Magie Relph - a piece of Indigo and kola nut fabric with a large tied circular motif in the centre. I just had to use it in a quilt, but I needed more fabrics to go with it. Another collection was born! Machine pieced, hand and machine quilted. Cotton and polyester wadding. Cotton, rayon invisible and metallic threads. 121 x 100 cm “

More information here

Updates on our website today – vintage Yoruba textiles

2010-06-29T04:07:00.001-07:00

Click pictures for description and larger view.

C19th indigo cotton and magenta silk

Very rare C19th woman’s wrapper cloth

Unique design, mid-C20th wrapper

Natural beige wild silk

Circa 1900 mixed strip hand spun cotton & indigo

Wearing African Textiles – part one of an occasional series

2010-06-06T08:48:00.001-07:00


Vintage postcard, circa 1920s – “Costume, S. Vincente, Cabo Verde.”	Vintage indigo dyed textile, pano cha, circa 1920-50, Cabo Verde.

Click on the photos to enlarge – please do not reproduce without permission.

A Wolof weaver on Goree island, 1844

2010-05-31T02:42:00.001-07:00

Although this sketch in the French National Archives is not the earliest depiction of a West African weaver it is exceptionally detailed and clear for a nineteenth century source. It was drawn by Isidore Hedde (1801-1880) a ribbon manufacturer from St. Etienne whose boat paused in Senegal on route to China as part of a French diplomatic mission. Undoubtedly Hedde’s own background in weaving contributed to the attention he paid to depicting the key loom components. The weaver is described as a slave and griot, although it seems likely, to me at least, that “slave” is Hedde’s gloss on the complex and anomalous status of weavers and other craftspeople in Senegambian societies. The drawing is accompanied by an important letter that describes at some length his observations on textile production in Goree at that date, including the surprising fact that there were 114 weavers on the small island. Click here to see more details.

By way of comparison, here is a Senegalese weaver depicted on an old postcard, dating from about 1905, by Charles Fortier (author’s collection.)

Fante Asafo Flags at Christie’s Paris, June 15th.

2010-05-27T03:10:00.001-07:00

	LOT 60, SALE 5599, PARIS Estimate: €4,000 - €6,000 ($4,922 - $7,383)
	LOT 61, SALE 5599, PARIS Estimate:€4,000 - €6,000 ($4,922 - $7,383)
	LOT 62, SALE 5599, PARIS Estimate: €4,000 - €6,000 ($4,922 - $7,383)

Featuring these three flags from a major European collection, this sale will be an important test of interest in Asafo flags at a major auction house after the new and dramatically higher prices they realised at Sotheby’s in the McAlpine Collection auctions in 2006 and 2007.

Weaving Dreams: Tracing Cotton and Fashion in Africa

2010-05-14T01:42:00.001-07:00

An interesting video by Amanda Martinez traces links between African fashion designers, the struggles of the Malian cotton industry and excessive US subsidies to American cotton growers.

Weaving Dreams: Tracing Cotton and Fashion in Africa from Amanda Martinez on Vimeo.

Featured in the video is the remarkable Malian designer and activist Awa Meite much of whose work involves exploring the design possibilities of local cotton and Mali’s ancient textile traditions. Awa’a website is here .

Legacy in Cloth: Batak Textiles

2010-05-05T03:16:00.001-07:00

This massive and wonderful book on the weaving of the Batak peoples of Sumatra sets a new standard for the documentation of the textile heritage of an indigenous tradition. Combining two decades of fieldwork with detailed study of museum collections and archive photographs Sandra Niessen has produced an exhaustive and definitive study which repays both casual browsing and careful study. For scholars of African textile traditions it lays down a challenge in terms of depth and detail of documentation and illustration that is both inspiring and daunting. For more details, a pdf of a sample chapter, and a way to purchase a copy direct from Sandra visit her website here

Some updates on our website today

2010-04-12T06:21:00.001-07:00

Click pictures for description and larger view.

Rare Asante silk kente

Rare Dioula cloth from Ivory Coast

Baule woman’s cloth from Ivory Coast

Senufo blanket from Ivory Coast

Manjak woman’s cloth, Senegal

Kpalime Ewe cloth, Togo

Long Live the President ! – African printed cloths exhibition in Amsterdam now.

2010-04-11T10:05:00.001-07:00

“Long Live the President ! Portrait Cloths from Africa” now at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (2 April – 29 August 2010). The exhibition, curated by Paul Faber, features over 100 African printed fabrics devoted mainly to commemorating African presidents, both the well known such as Mandela and Mobutu and the now perhaps justly obscure. The show includes East African kanga as well as printed pagne from West and Central Africa. It is accompanied by a catalogue in English (details here) that is the first substantive publication devoted to this important aspect of African textile design.

I am pleased to note that a large part of the show is drawn from the French private collection we featured on our website here back in 2005. Follow the link for more images and background information on African commemorative prints. Thanks to Bernard Collet, the collector of these pieces, for the images of the exhibition shown below. Click any photo for a larger view.

Curator Paul Faber discusses the exhibition (in Dutch)

African Textiles Sale

2010-03-29T09:38:00.001-07:00

We are having a sale of old stock, with cloths from Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso etc. All pieces are priced at GBP50, US$85, or Euro 60 plus shipping. 10% additional discount if you buy 2 or more pieces from this group. Images are online here: Sale Gallery

West African Robes in the British Museum collection

2010-03-12T05:37:00.001-08:00

This rare Liberian robe acquired by the British Museum from Henry Christy in the 1860s (click on the photo for more details) is one highlight among many of what must surely be the world’s most comprehensive and important collection of West African robes. Already numbering several hundred items it was recently augmented by the purchase of the Heathcote collection from David Heathcote, the scholar of Hausa embroidery (search the database using his name in the “Provenance” field to bring up 390 items in this collection, including robes, hats, trousers, embroidery samples etc. ) Derived from north African prototypes these robes are historically linked to the spread of Islam throughout much of West Africa in the course of the 2nd millennium C.E. Together with the related crafts of embroidery and narrow strip loom weaving their distribution closely followed patterns of long distance trade that were dominated by Muslim members of such peoples as the Mande and Hausa. (The relationship between narrow strip weaving and Islam in West Africa is a complex one that I may address in a later post.) Called boubou in Francophone literature and tobe in early Anglophone travellers’ reports, these elaborate man’s gowns were much admired by European visitors to the region and many early examples have found their way to the British Museum.

The best known regional style of robe tailoring and embroidery was the embroidered “riga” associated with the C19th Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria although it had, and in modern versions still has, a much wider distribution as an important style of male prestige dress across a large area of West Africa. The example shown above was woven from magenta dyed waste silk (alharini in Hausa, alaari in Yoruba) from the trans-Saharan trade and was part of the late C19th Beving collection. It retains an early label reading: 'Gown made from strips woven on a narrow loom with European waste silk yarns. Embroidered round neck with green European thread. Lined throughout with strips of native woven cloth of indigo and white yarns and around the hem with native woven cloths of grey waste silk yarns.' Throughout the Hausa, Nupe and Yoruba regions of Nigeria magenta silk formed a key component of a triumvirate of prestige fabrics along with beige local wild silk (Hausa tsamiya, Yoruba sanyan) and a fine indigo dyed check or plaid (Hausa saki, Yoruba etu.) Among the many early examples in the British Museum collection the three saki robes below show increasing degrees of elaboration in the classic Nigerian embroidery design known as “eight knives” (Hausa aska takwas.) [click on photos to go to the object records.]

The British Museum collection is also rich in more rare robe styles, several examples of which we show below.

Boubou tilbi, Djenne region, Mali

Boubou lomasa, Soninke people, Mali

Boubou Manding, Liberia/Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone, Mende or Sherbro people

For more information on West African robes consult the following sources:

Gardi,B. Le Boubou - c'est chic. (2002) – a superb and beautiful book.

Gardi,B. "La broderie" in Bedaux, R. & van der Waals, J. eds Djenné: une ville millénaire au Mali (1994)

Heathcote, D. "Aspects of Embroidery in Nigeria" in Picton,J. ed. The Art of African Textiles (1995) -see bibliography for Heathcot's numerous other articles on Hausa embroidery.

Perani,J. "The Cloth Connection: Patrons and Producers of Hausa and Nupe Prestige Strip-Weave"in History, Design, and Craft in West African Strip-Woven Cloth (1992)

Perani,J. & Wolff,N. "Embroidered Gowns and Equestrian Ensembles of the Kano Aristocracy." in African Arts 25(3) (1992)

Prussin, L. Hatumere: Islamic Design in West Africa (1986) Chapter 8

Worden, S. "Prestige Robes of the Hausa-Fulani in Liverpool Museum" in Text 30 (2002)

To see our some of our current stock, which primarily consists of early Nigerian robes, click here.

Fante Asafo Flag gallery returns

2010-02-24T02:28:00.001-08:00

Our gallery of Fante Asafo flags is back online here after some months hiatus. We now have a superb selection of genuine flags drawn in part from a major private collection assembled in the 1980s and early 90s, and in part from our own contacts in Ghana over recent years. For information on distinguishing these scarce authentic flags from the modern copies widely available on the net see my earlier post here.

Indigo in West Africa – an introduction

2010-02-13T03:40:00.001-08:00

Dried balls of indigo on sale in the market at Segou, Mali, early C20th. Vintage postcard, circa 1910, authors collection.

Indigo was the foundation of numerous textile traditions throughout West Africa. For centuries before the introduction of synthetic dyes the ability to transform everyday white cotton into prized deep blue cloth was a mysterious and highly valuable skill passed on by specialist dyers from generation to generation. From the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara to the grassland kingdoms of Cameroon, indigo cloth signified wealth, abundance and fertility. A century ago blue and white striped cloth was the normal attire across a vast area from Senegal to Cameroon, while numerous traditions of "shibori" type resist pattern dyeing flourished. Indigo in West Africa was obtained from local plant sources, either indigofera or lonchocarpus cyanescans. Transforming the raw material into a successful dye vat was a complex process requiring great expertise and liable to unexplained failure. Inevitably it was usually surrounded with ritual prescriptions and prohibitions. The primary ingredients were dried balls of crushed leaves from indigo bearing plants, ash, and the dried residue from old vats. Cloth had to be dipped repeatedly in the fermented dye, exposed briefly to the air, then re-immersed. The number of dippings, and the strength and freshness of the dye determined the intensity of the resulting colour.

A rare early C20th image of Yoruba women dyers with their clay dye pots. Vintage postcard, circa 1910, authors collection.

Appropriately it was women who dyed cloth with indigo in most areas, with the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Manding of Mali (especially the Soninke /Malinke) particularly well known for their expertise. Yoruba dyers paid tribute to a patron deity, Iya Mapo to ensure the success of the complex dye process.

Malinke dyers" old postcard, photograph taken by Edmund Fortier in the Futa Jallon region of Guinee in 1905. Note the use of a half buried pot as the dye vessel, and, at the left, a woman beating folded cloth to impart a glazed sheen.

Among the Hausa, where the export trade in prestige textiles was highly organised, male dyers working at communal dye pits were the basis of the wealth of the ancient city of Kano.

Hausa male dyers in Kano, circa 1950. Note the concrete dyepits sunk in the ground. Vintage postcard, authors collection.

After the dyed cloth had dried it was customary to beat the fabric repeatedly with wooden beaters, which both pressed the fabric and imparted a shiny glaze. In some areas additional indigo paste was beaten into the cloth at this stage, subsequently rubbing off on the skin of the wearer in a much desired effect.

Cloth beaters at work in the village of Kura near Kano, 2005. Author’s photo.

Today synthetic indigo and brightly coloured imported fabrics have largely displaced natural indigo except in remote regions and only in a few areas can one still see indigo cloths in regular use. For many cloths like those in our galleries dating from the early to mid-twentieth century represent the last remainders of a long tradition. Elsewhere though natural indigo continues to be used, for example by Dogon women in Mali and Mossi and Dioula in Burkina Faso. We have two selections of indigo dyed textiles, in our indigo gallery and our Nigerian adire resist dyed gallery, and other indigo dyed cloths available in our Francophone and Nigerian women's galleries.

Some more Ewe cloths….

2010-02-08T00:33:00.001-08:00

Details from Ewe484 – click to enlarge.

CODE# E484
PRICE : Email us for price
MEASURES: 112ins x 75, 283cm x 190
The supplementary weft float motifs on this cloth are exceptionally complex composite images combining two or three objects or animals and people with objects in a manner that I have no previously seen. The very neatly woven designs are framed within white weft faced stripes and rows of square blocks on a solid green ground. The cloth has a couple of patches near top left corner in the photo but otherwise is in very good condition. Dates from circa 1920-50.

CODE# E525

PRICE Email us for price

MEASURES: 119ins x 69, 303cm x 176

Superb, elaborate and complex Ewe chief's cloth with a variety of supplementary weft float motifs including people, birds, animals, swords, geometric designs etc, alternating with square weft faced blocks. One of the finest Ewe pieces we have collected in recent years. Parts of some of the weft motifs have worn away and a there are a few repairs but this remains an exceptional piece. Dates from circa 1900-20s.

CODE# E518
PRICE : Email us for price
MEASURES: 126ins x 71, 320cm x 180
Fine example of the weft faced "checkerboard" style of Ewe cotton man's cloth, with a soft well used feel and typical heavy weight of cloth. The addition of yellow is unusual in this style of Ewe cloth and adds a vibrancy to the design. Exceptionally for this type of cloth this example is complete and intact with no missing strips or repairs. In excellent condition and dating from early C20th.

For a wide selection of Ewe cloths, including smaller women’s cloths, click here to go to our website.

African Lace – forthcoming exhibition

2010-02-01T22:42:00.001-08:00

Advance notice of an interesting exhibition. From October 2010 to January 2011 the Ethnology Museum in Vienna will have a major exhibition on lace fabrics in Nigeria, in collaboration with the National Museum, Lagos. The show will then transfer to Lagos from March to Jun 2011. Austria is a major producer of lace for the West African market. A substantial catalogue in English and German editions will accompany the show. More details later in the year.

Nigeria in Costume

2010-02-01T12:03:00.001-08:00

Some plates from “Nigeria in Costume” published by the Shell Company of Nigeria to mark Nigerian Independence in 1960 and with a foreword by the then Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Fifty years on this book is a very obscure curiosity and I was pleased to find a copy in one of the few surviving bookshops in Charing Cross Road. The plates are of paintings by John Danford.

	A Yoruba oba (king.)
	Festival dress for the Ekong dance, Ibibio
	A District Head - Kano
	The Akpan Masquerade Womens’ Dress - Efik
	Akenzua II – Oba of Benin
	Agbada Dress - Yoruba
	Yoruba Girl
	Chief Ekperegin Olu Warri Osemme of Warri - Urhobo
	Ilorin Weaver
	An Egba Chief wearing the ceremonial dress of the Ogboni fraternity - Yoruba

Adire African Textiles

Six Yards Guaranteed Dutch Design–Vlisco exhibition at Museum voor moderne kunst, Arnhem

African Textiles in Africaniste Art–an unusual case.

African Textile Resources on our website updated–part three

Asante Kente Cloths

African Textile Resources on our website updated – part two

African Textile Resources on our website updated – part 0ne.

Sub-Saharan African Textiles: A basic reading list

“Fugu for life” by Kofi Akpabli

Kuba Images online at Smithsonian Eliot Elisofon Photograph Archives

Saudi Aramco World : The Weaver's Song

Fulani Woman by Monique Cras, Africaniste painter

Adire African Textiles mailing list

Kuba: some early textiles and photographs

New book: “Mama Casset”

Blue Notes

Agbada, Riga, Boubou… Nigerian prestige gowns.

“Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa”–major new exhibition now at the Textile Museum, Washington.

Weaving the Threads of Livelihood: the aesthetic and embodied knowledge of Berber weavers–new exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London

Asafo Company Banner–over 5 metres long

“Congo” cloths and Ewe weft float pattern making.

Some more Ewe cloths on our gallery today

Central African Textiles: Art and Cultural Narrative–fall symposium at the Textile Museum, Washington

Fante Asafo Flag–new update

African Headwear: Beyond Fashion–new exhibition at Dallas Museum of Art

Mangbetu hairstyle, Congo, 1958

An exceptional silk Asante kente cloth

West African Textiles from the Karun Thakar Collection now online…

An exceptional C19th Yoruba aso oke cloth

Drummers, poets, and master weavers: rhythm and structure in the design of Ewe “kente” cloths.

An exceptional early C20th Ewe “kente” cloth

The 1/4 million euro weaver’s pulley….

The tripod loom in Sierra Leone

“A behind the scenes look at Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection” by Carleton University Art Gallery curator Sandra Dyck

A Dan Chief’s Robe at Sotheby’s 13 May 2011

Wearing African Textiles-part 6: an Ewe woman’s cloth

Wearing African Textiles–part 5: Yoruba Aso Oke

CNN African Voices features Nike Davies Okundaye

Edmond Fortier and textile production in West Africa, 1900-1910

“Ibadan is sweet:” exploring a Yoruba adire eleko cloth.

"Bògòlanfini, Patterns of Bamana Culture," exhibition at SUNY Cortland

Erykah Badu Yoruba Style

Femme Daga, Mali

Africa Through A Lens

Agbada: embroidered robe traditions in Nigeria and beyond

Magic Squares: The Patterned Imagination of Muslim Africa in Contemporary Culture

More Asafo Flags on our website

Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection

Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection

Curated by Catherine Hale

February 14, 2011 - April 17, 2011

At the kente festival, Kpetoe, 2007

African Textile Exhibitions in 2011 by opening date..

Conversation Pieces: African Textiles from Barbara and Bill McCann’s Collection

Curated by Catherine Hale

Fante Asafo Flags on display in Genoa

Ancestral indigo cloths of Saint-Louis

Mandjak Textiles exhibition in Saint-Louis, Senegal

10 décembre - 31 décembre 2010 Exposition « Pagnes … Panos »

The Lamb Collection of African Textiles on-line

“African Lace” exhibition in Vienna–some photographs

Exceptional early Kuba cloth at Sotheby’s Paris

Wearing African Textiles–part 4.

Wearing African Textiles - part 3

New book: African Wax Print, A Textile Journey by Magie Relph & Robert Irwin

New book: “Contemporary African Fashion”

Some more vintage Yoruba adire cloths from Nigeria

New book: “Asafo” by Federico Carmignani

Some more vintage textiles from Francophone West Africa

Some more vintage Asante silk kente

Some more vintage Ewe cloths

“Nigerian Artistry” – availability update

New book: “Nigerian Artistry” by Pat Oyelola

Africa in fashion (again)

Mumuye Weaving: to Zing in search of langtang

Post-minimalist Composition and African Textiles ?

Wearing African Textiles – part two

New address for our website – adireafricantextiles.com

“Under African Skies” – quilting exhibition in York

Updates on our website today – vintage Yoruba textiles

10 décembre - 31 décembre 2010
Exposition « Pagnes … Panos »