February
[Program Change] Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia With Roy W. Hamilton
Saturday, February 7, 2015, 10am Lecture Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum
Roy Hamilton will present his Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia, originally organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA. In it weavers and batik artists speak for themselves in videos recorded at eight sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and East Timor. What motivates them to create new patterns? How do they adjust to changing social and economic situations? A panoply of human emotions and experience—determination, longing, dream inspiration, theft, war, and more—emerge from the stories of these remarkable women.
Roy W. Hamilton has been Curator of Asian and Pacific Collections at the Fowler Museum at UCLA since 1994. His first exhibition, Gift of the Cotton Maiden: Textiles of Flores and the Solor Islands was on view when the Textile Society of America (TSA) convened for its fourth biennial symposium at UCLA that year. His book Material Choices: Refashioning Bast and Leaf Fibers in Asia and the Pacific, co-edited with B. Lynne Milgram, won TSA’s R. L. Shep Award for the best ethnographic textile book of 2007. Other exhibitions, each accompanied by a book, have gone on national tour, including From the Rainbow’s Varied Hue: Textiles of the Southern Philippines (1998) and Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia (2012).