Saturday, March 22, 2014

“Taiwan Aboriginal Textiles: A Collector’s Detective Story“

with

Martha and Avrum Bluming

TMA/SC Members and Collectors

Calabasas, California

Long isolated in the mountain highlands throughout Southeast Asia, hundreds of tribal minorities without written languages developed distinctive textile traditions that became the primary record of their cultural beliefs and their histories, written with thread in the fabrics they created for daily life and festival celebration. As the modern world began to penetrate these villages, the tribal textiles of mainland China, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines came to be regarded as fine works of art as well.  Little known to the wider world, however, the tribal textiles of Taiwan, the ancestral predecessors of many of the other more well-known groups, remained largely out of view in the private museums of a few collectors. Discovering images of some of these remarkable pieces, TMA/SC members Avrum and Martha Bluming set out on a voyage of discovery that took them to Taiwan in 2012, where they were privileged to visit several private museums and allowed to photograph the collections. They will give a special presentation to TMA/SC on what they saw, as well as on the process of discovery to which this experience led.

Avrum and Martha Bluming are long-time collectors of tribal textiles and jewelry, an interest that began in 1969, when they began a two-year adventure living in Kampala, Uganda, where Avrum, an oncologist, ran a research unit for the National Cancer Institute. Avrum, a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia P & S Medical School, and Martha, a graduate of Barnard College and New York University and a former editor for the Johns Hopkins University Press, have spent all their subsequent overseas vacations travelling to remote villages in Asia and Africa, photographing and writing about the fast disappearing cultures that first captivated them in the 1960’s.  The Blumings invite TMA/SC members to bring examples of Taiwanese textiles to share with the group.