December 2009

Affordable Art Fair – Applications Open!

This fair will take place in Singapore from 22-25 April and will be the first Affordable Art Fair in Asia. The first Affordable Fair was held in London 10 years ago and annual fairs are now held in New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels with sister fairs in Sydney and Melbourne.
More details can be found at http://www.affordableartfair.com.sg

Batik in Animation & Video

An interesting YouTube video on batik…

Batik collections of President Obama’s mother

Batik collections of President Obama’s mother, Ann Durham Image courtesy: Wikipedia While doing some research on the Internet, I discovered a Flikr site that features the batik collections of President Obama’s mother, Ann Durham.

And here’s an interesting write-up about Ann Durham’s passion for batik and an exhibition that featured her batik collections, “A Lady Found a Culture in its Cloth: Barack Obama’s Mother and Indonesian Batiks“.. Ann Dunham loved and collected many handcrafted objects, including textiles. As a teenager, she wove wall hangings in earthy shades of brown and green for her own enjoyment.

After marrying Lolo Soetoro and moving to Indonesia in the 1960s with her son Barack Obama, she was naturally drawn to the vibrant textile arts of her new home. She began to amass a collection of Javanese batiks — fabrics patterned by using a wax-resist process — from which this exhibition is drawn. These textiles were readily seen on city and village streets in this Southeast Asian nation at that time.

Her interests in batik patterned cloth were complex. She did not acquire rare or expensive pieces, but rather contemporary examples that were an expression of a living tradition, patterned with both classic designs and those of passing fashion.

 The lives of the batik makers also fascinated her. While earning degrees in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in the 1970s and 1980s, she focused on how to help craftspeople, like those creating batik in Indonesia. She worked with the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and later with USAID and the World Bank, guiding projects beneficial to poor women through microand small enterprises.

She eventually set up microcredit projects all over Indonesia as well as in Pakistan and Kenya.

 The wide variation in the batiks on view in this exhibition reflects the range of colors and patterns that captured her imagination and provides a window into Indonesian culture

~ The Textile Museum, Washington D.C, August 6, 2009

by Jeannie Cotter