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Jazzy African Textiles
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20240 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
1,461 Words |
| Author
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Patricia Malarcher
Patricia Malarcher writes on the arts from Englewood, New
Jersey. |
Patterns shift and jog; bands of color dance up and down. Asymmetrical, unmatching borders throw compositions off center. Juxtapositions of tribal emblems and contemporary symbols lend vigor and surprise. Indeed, the liveliness of African textiles offers a complex visual experience. Generally, there is more play and freedom, a more casual approach to design, than one finds in the regular repeats of patterns in Western-style textiles. Yet these distinctive characteristics rarely have been recognized outside Africa as international expression of aesthetic preferences. The problem, it seems, is due not only to a fault of perception but also to the lack of a descriptive language for discussing these qualities in positive terms.
African Improvisation: Textiles from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, a recent touring exhibition, attempted to address this gap in critical analysis. The show was organized around the premise that aesthetic values in traditional African fabrics are related to the structural principles of jazz. More specifically, words such as syncopation and percussive were culled from the language of jazz to describe compositional features of cloth. When the twenty-eight woven, dyed, printed, and embroidered pieces chosen for the show were on view at the American Craft Museum in New York City (January 30-April 19,1992), a background of recorded jazz played up their relationship to improvisational musical rhythms. The show in New York concluded a tour that began at the Indianapolis Museum and went on to the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
A number of significant shows of African textiles have appeared since the landmark exhibition African Textiles and Decorative Arts was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972. African Improvisation departed from its predecessors in its emphasis on design rather than on the cultural significance of fabrics--their relationship to social status, for example--or textile technology. Although most of the cloths were intended as apparel, they were shown as self-sufficient artworks unaccompanied by photographs of how they were worn. Especially distinctive was the use of another art form as a lens through which to analyze the cloth. This unconventional approach suggests that basic groundwork in African studies has opened the way for fresh curatorial insights.
African Improvisation was conceived by the late Peggy Stoltz Gilfoy, who had been a curator of textiles and ethnological art at the Indianapolis Museum. In a catalog written for an earlier show, she referred to the beat of African music in relation to textiles. It
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