April 7, 2012

April 7, 2012 “Order And Disorder: Alighiero Boetti By Afghan Women”: From 1971 to 1994, Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) embarked on a series of projects with Afghan embroiderers, creating monumental pieces that would become some of the artist’s most iconic works. Working first in Kabul in the 1970s and then in refugee camps in Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Afghan women embroidered works based on Boetti’s templates that include: colorful grids of letters that spell out phrases (such as “Order and Disorder”); Mappe (maps), wall-sized world maps with countries filled-in with the colors and symbols of their flags; and Tutto (everything), large-scale works entirely filled with intricately embroidered shapes representing diverse objects—sunglasses, a Hindu goddess, a protractor, twins, and more. The exhibition features twenty-nine works by Boetti along with documentary photographs of the Afghan embroiderers taken in 1990 at Boetti’s request by Randi Malkin Steinberger, as well as examples of the traditional styles of embroidery that might have played a role in stimulating Boetti's best-known works.

“Second Skins: Painted Barkcloth from Papua New Guinea and Central Africa”

Second Skins juxtaposes two separate traditions of fabricating vibrantly graphic clothing from the inner bark of trees: one shared by diverse peoples who live in and around the Ituri rainforest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the other produced by the Ömie of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific. Focusing on twentieth century and contemporary iterations of possibly ancient traditions, the exhibition will explore barkcloth’s contemporary “migration” from the body to the gallery wall, highlighting the genre’s artistic inventiveness and the differing ways the two traditions have interacted with the international art market.

The simultaneous tours will be led by curators Roy Hamilton and Gemma Rodrigues, beginning promptly at 11 a.m.

Roy Hamilton, Principal Museum Scientist (Senior Curator for Asian and Pacific Collections),

A graduate of Stanford University, with an MA in Museum Studies/Anthropology, University of Washington. He is the head and supervisor of the Fowler’s curatorial staff, and is responsible for the development of exhibitions and publications on a variety of subjects based on the museum's Asian/Pacific collections. In addition to being co-curator of the His textile exhibitions at the Fowler have most recently included the Nini Towok exhibition, plus Courtly and Urban Batik from Java, and the video Weaver’s Stories.Material Choices: Bast and Leaf Fiber Textiles; The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia; Wild Silk, Island Fibers: Rare Textiles from Madagascar; From the Rainbow’s Varied Hue: Textiles of the Southern Philippines; The Women's Warpath: Iban Ritual Fabrics from Borneo, and many more, and he has authored the catalogs which accompany these exhibitions, as well as other publications. He also directs major ongoing research programs in art and material culture of Asia and the Pacific, including field research and collecting, and the development of cooperative efforts with Southeast Asian museums.

Gemma Rodrigues has been Curator of African arts at the Fowler Museum at UCLA since fall 2010. Her doctoral research at Harvard, Guns and Rhodes: Land, Memory, and Modernity, focused on contested idioms of indigenous place-making in Harare, Zimbabwe. She has received grants from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and the Getty Research Institute, among others. 1997-2000, she lectured in art history at the Harare Polytechnic and in 1998, she co-founded a trust that continues to foster the visual arts in Zimbabwe. While at Fowler, she has curated five exhibitions treating a wide array of tradition-based and contemporary African art and visual culture.