The Weavings of War:
An exhibition of textiles in the main floor gallery through September 18, 2005.

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The textiles in Weavings of War are created by using traditional techniques, but their powerful imagery reflects the war-torn environments in which their makers live. The textile artists, mostly women, record violent images they have witnessed first hand, giving voice to stories that would otherwise be unheard. Personal and universal, they are moving accounts that challenge the idea that folk arts are unchanging, passive menial crafts, irrelevant to contemporary life, depicting quaint, simpler times.

This exhibit documents this phenomenon of war textiles across cultures for the first time, comparing the war textile images of Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos, Peru, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Palestine, and South Africa. These fiber works incorporate scenes of massacres and labor camps, and the modern machinery of war such as detailed AK-47's, tanks, helicopters, grenades and minefields. Many of the works in the show were created through the impetus of foreign aid workers, activists and missionary groups, but the techniques are non-western, and the expressive styles and content are unique to the individual makers. Through foreign intervention, these fiber works have been brought to Western markets, often smuggled, to become a form of activism, spreading the stories of the oppressed while also creating income for them.

Many of the artworks serve as a way of dealing with what is impossible to forget. Hmong story cloth artist Pang Xiong Sirirathasuk Sikoun recalls, "We could not forget the things that had happened to us. Many times when the women were sewing they would cry. One woman I know, she had a new baby. And the people she was traveling with said, 'Your baby is crying too much, it's too dangerous.' So they put a cloth over the baby's face and it died. How (do) you get over that? It is always with you."

A woman from Chile was haunted by her mother, who disappeared under Pinochet, and sewed what she imagined happened to her onto an "arpillera", a local folk art form. "With the arpilleras I feel I continue to search for her. The government cannot buy our silence with food or money. That is what we want to show".