Tracing Threads of History

Rediscovering Indonesian Textiles at the Brooklyn Museum

Bibliographic Data

ID7928012
AuthorsMeghan Bill (0000-0002-5451-2031, Brooklyn Museum, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume44
Issue1-2
Pages38-54
Publication date2021-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMuseum Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0892-8339 • E-ISSN: 1548-1379
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/muan.12236
OpenAlexW3214219544
LanguageEN
References cited19

Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research, exhibit, and engage collections. Using recent research into one Balinese slendang in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, this essay examines how the Museum’s frameworks and curatorial assumptions enabled the neglect of nearly 200 Indonesian textiles for decades. It examines how the Museum parsed collection categories, how Indonesian textiles complicated and confounded those categories, and how the ensuing inattention inadvertently enabled a well‐preserved collection. By attempting to weave the textiles’ collecting histories into narratives of their embedded colonial and institutional histories, it hopes to rekindle their usefulness for scholars, for communities, and for the Museum

Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Indonesian · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History

Tools

Open DOI