February 2nd – March 5th, 2010
Textiles can tell us a lot about a culture, its history and relationship to the world. Motivated by necessity many of the works in this exhibit were made to be functional objects and as such would be widely categorized as crafts.
When we look at contemporary crafts, especially from a westernized perspective, there is a tendency to evaluate them according how they might reflect an artist’s individual expression. With the traditional textile arts of many indigenous peoples, however, the emphasis was not on personal expression but rather on sustaining and preserving the identity of the culture group.
Though a few of the textiles on exhibit reveal the explicit and implicit decorative intentions of the people who made them, the real stories they tell are best understood in the context of the cultures from which they came.
Uncommon Threads is an exhibit that brings these stories closer to the surface by looking at the textiles arts of these cultures and the conditions that make them unique.