Some more Ewe cloths on our gallery today

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

“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

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

“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

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

An exceptional silk Asante kente cloth

 

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…

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)