Holy Cross’ Cantor Art Gallery Presents Exhibition on Asian Hand-Loomed Cloths

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross presents Gold Cloths of Sumatra: Indonesia’s Songkets from Ceremony to Commodity from March 1 to April 18. The exhibition offers both 19th century and contemporary examples of one of Asia’s most spectacular traditional, hand-loomed textiles: the gold-thread cloths, or songkets, of the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra and the Palembang Malays of South Sumatra.

A series of events in conjunction with the exhibition will be held at the Cantor Art Gallery. Docent tours of the exhibition are available upon request. Three Holy Cross students are working with Susan Rodgers, professor of anthropology at Holy Cross, to offer guided docent tours of Gold Cloths of Sumatra: Indonesia’s Songkets from Ceremony to Commodity. For further information and available times of the guided tours, please call the Cantor Art Gallery at 508-793-3356.

• March 1, 4 p.m. Opening gallery talk by Susan Rodgers and Dr. Anne Summerfield, Indonesian textile researcher, titled “Introduction to the Exhibition: Commerce and Creativity in Sumatran Songket Textiles.” • March 1, 5:30 – 6:30 p.m. Opening reception. • March 2, Noon. Gallery walk-through by Dr. Anne Summerfield and Dr. John Summerfield, Indonesian textile researchers. • March 15, 4 p.m. Gallery talk by Melanie Chapman ’07 titled “Indonesian Textiles and the Feminine.” Sponsored by Women’s and Gender Studies. • March 16, Noon. Gallery talk by Susan Rodgers and student docents, Melanie Chapman ’07, Colleen Germain ’07, and Sarah Thibeault ’07, titled “Introduction to the Exhibition: Commerce and Creativity in Sumatran Textiles.” • March 20, 4 p.m. Gallery talk by Dr. Anita Hibler, adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, University College, titled “Threads of American Diplomacy in Southeast Asia: Elephants for Mr. Lincoln.” • April 3, 2 p.m. Gallery talk by Megan Osborne ’05 titled “Museum Representations of Asia: A Comparison of Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History.” A Fulbright recipient, Osborne worked in Asian Civilisations Museum, a new and innovative museum in Singapore. • April 11, Noon. Gallery talk by Susan Rodgers and Roger Hankins, director of the Cantor Art Gallery, titled “Weavers, Markets and Museums: The Making of an Exhibition.”

Songkets are worn as sarongs, shoulder cloths, and head-ties during rituals such as weddings and the installation of village chieftains. They are made of silk or fine cotton, interwoven with supplementary wefts of gold-wrapped thread.

Songkets’ creators are Muslim women and adolescent girls, although some boys and men are also weaving today. Indonesian textile craft, in general, helps constitute the feminine in a range of village and urban communities. Sumatran textiles also speak of hidden worlds of poetic and political meaning and can be “read” for their inlaid messages.

Antique songkets from Minangkabau and Palembang reached perhaps unparalleled heights of weaving excellence, but the craft remains a thriving — even expanding — art today. This exhibition looks precisely at those elements of resiliency and deep artistic creativity in songkets, from many regions of Sumatra. These songket textiles today have become part of globalizing fashion worlds and are also caught up in heated conversations about conservative, sedate standards of pious Muslim dress.

The exhibition is based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in Sumatra from 2003 to 2006 by Rodgers. The Cantor Art Gallery is fortunate once again to be collaborating with the textile scholars Anne and John Summerfield, who have conducted more than 30 years of research on the subject. They co-authored the exhibition catalogue with Rodgers. The show also draws on Holy Cross’ new permanent Study Collection of Indonesian Textiles.

The exhibition compares and contrasts historical examples of objects created between the 1800s and 1945 from the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and two private collections with recently produced and hand woven contemporary songket textiles in Holy Cross’ own collection.

Additional support for the exhibition was provided by the Holy Cross departments of sociology and anthropology, Asian Studies, and the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies.

Gold Cloths of Sumatra is the third exhibition in a series mounted by the Cantor Art Gallery on Southeast Asian hand-loomed cloth. The first, Weaving Life, Weaving Wealth: Sumatran Textiles in Transition. Cloth, Gender and Power in Contemporary Indonesia, was mounted in1995; the second, Keris/Cloth: Sacred Metal and Textile Arts of Indonesia in 2003.

About the Curators

Susan Rodgers is an anthropologist who has studied Indonesian print literatures and indigenous arts since 1974 and has curated two previous exhibitions on Southeast Asian art at the Cantor Art Gallery. She was the curator of Power and Gold: Jewelry from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, 1985, for the Musee Barbier-Mueller, Geneva, Switzerland, and the Asia Society Gallery, New York. Her most recent book is Print, Poetics, and Politics: A Sumatran Epic in the Colonial Indies and New Order Indonesia (KITLV Press, 2005). Her Ph.D. in anthropology is from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Anne Summerfield has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. Following a long career in teaching and business she has become a major scholar of Southeast Asian textiles, specializing in Minangkabau traditions. Dr. John Summerfield, whose Ph.D. in economics is also from University of California, Berkeley, is a specialist in international airline economics. He is also a prominent textile researcher. Together they co-edited Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau, (Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1999). They have curated numerous museum exhibitions on songkets.

Gallery Information

The hours for the Cantor Art Gallery are Monday – Friday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Saturdays, 2 - 5 p.m. The gallery will be closed March 3 and March 10 (Saturdays) and April 5 - 7 for Easter break.

Located in O’Kane Hall, First Floor, College of the Holy Cross, 1 College Street, Worcester, Mass, 01610. Admission to the gallery is free. Public parking is located on Linden Lane, gate 2, off College Street.

For more information, call the Cantor Art Gallery at 508-793-3356 or visit the Gallery’s Web site.