Saturday, October 29, 2016

10 a.m. Refreshments     10:30 a.m.  Program

Early Carpets and Tapestrieson the Eastern Silk Road

with 

Gloria Gonick

Art Historian and Research Associate, The Fowler Museum, UCLA and TMA/SC Member 

A mysterious group of carpets and tapestries were created more than five hundred years ago along an eastern branch of the Silk Road. These puzzling carpets and textiles have been preserved in closed treasure houses in Kyoto, the former capital of Japan, since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  They are brought out only one day a year for the Gion Festival, a Shinto-Buddhist procession, and quickly returned to storage.  Author and researcher Gloria Gonick will tell about her decade of exploring temples, towns and wool-weaving workshops in the Yellow River Valley, a little-known northeastern branch of the Silk Road, tracking their origins in China, the pariahs who wove them, the meaning of their obscure motifs, and the reason for the secrecy continuing to surround their exhibition.

Gloria Granz Gonick is an art historian and Research Associate at the Folwer Museum at UCLA, and former Museum Curator for the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum.  She was Guest Curator for the 2003 Fowler exhibition Matsuri!  Japanese Festival Arts.  In addition to the accompanying catalog Matsuri!, she is also author of Splendor of the Dragon: Costumes of the Ryuku Kingdom, published on the occasion of an exhibition organized in cooperation with the Okinawa Prefectural Museum in 1995.  Her quest over the past two decades for the sites in Asia where the mystery carpets and tapestries in the Kyoto collections were created has taken her on multiple research visits to China and Japan, where she has studied the textiles and eventually uncovered their intriguing past.  Gloria is also a founding member of TMA/SC.  She invites members of TMA/SC to bring examples of Chinese carpets for show & tell. 

 Luther Hall,  Lower Level     St. Bede’s Episcopal Church

3590 Grand View Blvd.  Los Angeles, CA  90066-1904

Just south of the 10 freeway, and west of the 405, near the intersection of Centinela and Palms.  Free parking.