Nov. 17-18: "Weavings of War" Exhibit
The Steering Committee of the Legacies of Violence Research Circle (LOV) would like to invite you to participate in a forthcoming lecture on the evening of 17th November at 5:00 PM (Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140 800 University Avenue) and a gallery tour of Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory at The Textile Gallery (School of Human Ecology) on the morning of the 18th November.
Over the past 35 years textile artists around the world, mostly women, have broken with tradition to depict their personal experiences of modern warfare. War textiles bring the lens of folk art to the images of destruction that appear nightly on television screens: minefields, massacres, and labor camps; heliicopters, tanks, rifles, and grenades...
"Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory" brings together these strikingly similar works into a national traveling exhibition for the first time, and explores the significance of these parallel developments in dissimilar cultures. It gathers together a collection of beautiful fabrics which speak to the ravages of war-particularly on women- and to the creativity with which women have responded to the effects of prolonged armed conflict on their respective cultures.
The exhibit showcases war textiles from the Afghan Turkmen, Baluch, Pashtun, and Baghlani; the Quecha of Peru; Chileans; the Montagnards of Vietnam; Vietnamese boat people; the Tai-Lüe and the Hmong of Laos; Palestinians; Bedouins; and South Africans. These objects have been assembled from public and private collections in the U.S., Latin America, Australia, and Africa. Accompanying materials include first person stories and photographs of the artists, photographs of the refugee camps, and brief historical and cultural descriptions of the originating groups. A full-color, 90-page catalog of the exhibition is available.
Lecture by Cy Thao, November 15, 5:40 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., Madison. Hmong artist and Minnesota legislator Thao will discuss his series of story-cloth style paintings, The Hmong Migration. Co-sponsored by the Department of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Violent Texts/Violent Textiles," a symposium organized by the Legacies of Violence Reseach Circle and co-sponsored by the Center for Humanities, comprises the following events on November 17 and 18:
Lecture by James E. Young, November 17, 5 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., Madison. Young, professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will speak on "Memory, Absence, and the End of the Monument in Berlin and New York."
Gallery talk, November 18, 9 a.m., Design Gallery. With Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, curator of the exhibition.
Panel discussion, November 18, 10:30 a.m., Room 21, School of Human Ecology. With Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, James E. Young, and faculty and members of the Legacies of Violence Research Circle.
