Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010 In Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia, 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. The videos are accompanied by newly made textiles created by each of the featured weavers and batik makers.
Major support for Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and the R.L. Shep Endowment Fund. Additional support is provided by the Asian Cultural Council, the Fowler Textile Council and NCCA (National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Republic of the Philippines).
The accompanying programs are made possible through the Yvonne Lenart Public Programs Fund and Manus, the support group for the Fowler Museum.
Nini Towok’s Spinning Wheel: Cloth and the Cycle of Life in Kerek, Java August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010 The community of Kerek is the last place in Java where batik is still produced on handwoven cotton cloth and where a full range of handwoven textiles provides the foundation for a remarkable system of knowledge. Named after Nini Towok, the Javanese goddess who cultivates cotton in the heavens and sends her yarn to Earth in for form of moonbeams, the exhibition explores the multiple meanings of Kerek’s rustic but beautiful textiles. Many fine examples of these rarely seen cloths illustrate the various techniques, patterns, and color combinations. The exhibition concludes with a series of seventeen outfits, each specific to a particular individual according to their sex, age, social status, occupation, and place of residence.
The exhibition was developed by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and is based on the research of Netherlands textile scholar Rens Heringa. It represents the most comprehensive showing of Kerek cloth ever mounted by a museum and is accompanied by published catalog.
Major support is provided by the R.L.Shep Endowment Fund and the Fowler Textile Council. Additional support for the publication is provided by the Cotsen Foundation for Academic Research.
The accompanying programs are made possible through the Yvonne Lenart Public Programs Fund and Manus, the support group for the Fowler Museum.
Korean Funerary Figures: Companions for the Journey to the Other World August 22, 2010 to November 28, 2010 Korean Funerary Figures: Companions for the Journey to the Other World features seventy-four Korean funerary figures—most carved in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—known as kkoktu. These charming and festively painted wooden clowns, tigers, acrobats and more were created to adorn biers used to convey coffins during funeral processions.
Their clothing and poses reflect the realities of rural Korean village life during a period about which few written records remain. Perhaps even more interestingly, the kkoktu are a window on a characteristically Korean attitude towards death. Though the kkoktus’ gaiety seems incongruous with mourning, they express a culture’s deep desire that the dead enter the next world surrounded by joy—and an appreciation of the fleeting nature of all experience.
This exhibition was organized by The Korea Society. The works presented are on loan from the permanent collection of the Seoul-based Ockrang Cultural Foundation. Support for the Los Angeles presentation was made possible by the Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director’s Discretionary Fund.
The accompanying programs are made possible through the Yvonne Lenart Public Programs Fund and Manus, the support group for the Fowler Museum.
The Korea Society Mission
The Korea Society is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) organization with individual and corporate members that is dedicated solely to the promotion of greater awareness, understanding and cooperation between the people of the United States and Korea. In pursuit of its mission, the Society arranges programs that facilitate discussion, exchanges and research on topics of vital interest to both countries in the areas of public policy, business, education, intercultural relations and the arts. Funding for these programs is derived from contributions, endowments, grants, membership dues and program fees. From its base in New York City, the Society serves audiences across the country through its own outreach efforts and by forging strategic alliances with counterpart organizations in other cities throughout the United States as well as in Korea.
Life in Ceramics: Five Contemporary Korean Artists August 22, 2010 to February 13, 2011 Life in Ceramics: Five Contemporary Korean Artists, brings together for the first time the work of Kim Yikyung, Lee In Chin, Lee Kang Hyo, Lee Youngjae, and Yoon Kwang-cho. These artists create strikingly different and highly individual works, transgressing the border between “art” and “craft” through their impressive installations and the monumental, sculptural appearance of their work. At the same time each artist celebrates the utility of the Korean ceramic traditions by making wares for daily use.
Life in Ceramics is organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and guest curated by Burglind Jungmann, UCLA Professor of Korean Art History and former adjunct associate curator of Korean art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Major support is provided by the Korea Foundation. Additional generous support provided by Dr. Leland M. Garrison and Mrs. Kweesook K. Garrison with contributions from Korean Airlines, Duracoat Products, Inc. Chairman Myung K. Hong, Mr. Jae Min Chang and Mrs. Hyunjoo Chang, Mr. Daewon Kwon and Mrs. Chong Kwon, Dr. No-Hee Park and Mrs. Yu Bai Park, and Dr. Tom Han.
The accompanying programs are made possible through The W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, the Yvonne Lenart Public Programs Fund, UCLA Asia Institute, UCLA Center for Korean Studies, and Manus, the support group for the Fowler Museum.
Official Media Sponsor: The Korea Times USA
Official Hotel Sponsor: Hotel Angeleno
Fowler in Focus: Monochrome Ceramics from Ancient Mexico September 12, 2010 to January 23, 2011 These carved and incised ceramics from various pre-Columbian traditions— many contemporaneous with brilliantly painted ceramic styles of the Mesoamerican Classic period—reflect a deliberate rejection of color in favor of an aesthetic that valued the sculpted form. Ranging from the Pre-Classic to the Post-Classic periods, these styles reveal intercultural connections, such as between Teotihuacan, the great Classic urban center in Central Mexico, and the Maya region. This selection from the Fowler collection—including elegant jars shaped as calabashes, vessels expertly sculpted with shrimp tails, parrots, and crayfish, and bowls carved with figural scenes or fantastic creatures—highlights how ceramic styles were shared, appropriated, and transformed at specific historical moments in ancient Mexico.
Street Art: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin by Larry Yust September 19, 2010 to January 16, 2011 Filmmaker and photographer Larry Yust applies his panoramic perspective to emergent—and often controversial—art forms that enliven metropolitan streetscapes. For this exhibition Yust turned his lens on Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin, exploring how red-brick warehouse facades, cinderblock walls lining thoroughfares, wooden barriers at construction sites, and fences surrounding vacant lots become prominent sites for open-air, and largely unofficial, artistic expression. The large, colorful prints—measuring from six to nearly eighteen feet in length—present richly detailed views of popular, and often overlapping, urban decorative styles: aerosol art (murals and graffiti), storefront signage and commercial advertising, and the creatively ordered display of merchandise and personal possessions.
This exhibition and publication are made possible by a generous grant from the Lloyd E. Rigler–Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation.
Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley February 13, 2011 to July 23, 2011
The Benue River Valley is the source of some of the most expressive and abstract sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet compared to the majority populations living in northern and southern Nigeria, the many and diverse groups flanking the 650-mile-long Benue River—and their fascinating arts—are far less known and studied. Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley will be the first major international exhibition to present a comprehensive view of the arts produced in the region. See more than 150 objects used in a range of ritual contexts, with genres as varied and complex as the vast region itself—figurative wood sculptures, masks, figurative ceramic vessels, and elaborate bronze and iron regalia—in a groundbreaking exhibition that demonstrates how the history of central Nigeria can be “unmasked” through the dynamic interrelationships of its peoples and their arts.
This exhibition is organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in association with the Musée du quai Branly, Paris. After the world premiere at the Fowler Museum, Central Nigeria Unmasked will travel to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, and the Musée du quai Branly. The exhibition is co-curated by Marla C. Berns (Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director, Fowler Museum at UCLA), Richard Fardon (Professor of West African Anthropology, University of London), Hélène Joubert (Chief Curator of African Collections, Musée du quai Branly), and Sidney Kasfir (Professor of Art History, Emory University, Atlanta).
Jam Sessions: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World March 20, 2011 to August 14, 2011 This exceptional collection of photographs and documents drawn from important archives around the country chronicles the tours of American jazz legends as they traveled the globe on behalf of the U.S. State Department. From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and others served as cultural diplomats .Jam Session includes nearly 100 compelling images of musicians visiting thirty-five countries in four continents. Millions of people experienced these concerts and thrilled to the many styles and variations of the remarkable American art form called jazz music.
This exhibition is guest curated by Curtis Sandberg, Vice President for the Arts at the Meridian International Center, with professor Penny M. Von Eschen, an expert in the history of jazz diplomacy and author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.
