Stanley Museum of Art exhibit highlights African textiles in Iowa

More than 6,000 miles from the African continent, the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art boasts a globally-recognized collection of African art: statues, pottery, ritual objects and textiles.

“Weaving Narratives: African Textiles in Iowa,” a current exhibit at the Stanley Museum of Art, highlights a selection of textiles from the collection. Through written materials and video-recorded interviews, the stories behind these remarkable artifacts are shared by voices from the African community in Iowa City.

The exhibit fills a few spacious rooms at the Stanley Museum, compact enough so that visitors can linger and spend time with each item, and extensive enough to illustrate the wealth of textile traditions on the African continent.

A few items visitors can observe up close at the exhibit are a beaded bridal apron with brightly-colored geometric patterns from South Africa, a primitive-looking black and white wall-hanging —made for the tourist trade in Côte d'Ivoire — and woven silk cloth with bright strips meant to be worn by royalty in Tunisia.

Mellon Curator Fellow Peju Layiwola and her colleague, the Stanley Museum’s Curator of African Art Cory Gundlach, decided to highlight these textiles as a way to bring members of the growing African community of Eastern Iowa together with the art of their homelands here at the museum.

“Many people will say that Africans don’t go to museums,” Layiwola said. “[Africans] don’t like to view ritual objects at museums. Many of those objects were stolen under traumatic situations.” Even a museum display of ritual objects that were traded fairly can feel wrong.

But traditional fabrics are part of the everyday lives of Africans —both on the continent and here in Iowa.

“Textiles are celebratory,” Layiwola said. “People can relate to them without pain.”

In fact, Africans love to talk about the traditional textiles of their countries and ethnic groups. Knowing that, Laiwola and Gundlach reached out to members of local African communities in Eastern Iowa to collaborate on choosing items for the exhibit and conveying their stories.

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“We looked at the collection together and looked for a theme,” said Sunday Goshit, a Nigerian-born Iowa resident and one of the community members who assisted in curating the exhibit. “We selected what we thought best represented that theme.”

Goshit and the other African-born residents were also charged with helping to get their communities engaged with the exhibit. That meant reaching out to people of different African nationalities in the area.

African-born Iowa residents represent many nationalities, with especially large populations of people from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.

Each of those nationalities — and often, each ethnic group within those nations — has its own textile-making traditions, many of which are discussed by community members in a lively video that shows on a loop at the entrance to the exhibit.

Layiwola, a textile artist and dyer herself, is particularly interested in the indigo-dyed textiles created in Western Africa, like one on display from Guinea. Visitors to the exhibit can read about the processes used to make the textiles, from dying to weaving to finishing.

“In Western cultures, you don’t know who makes your clothes, you just buy them from a store,” Layiwola said. For traditional African clothing, it’s different. “You might have a relationship with the fabric makers ... You buy fabric at the market and have someone make clothes for you.”

Much can be learned about African cultures from studying the process of textile-making.

“There are gender differences in the way men and women work on these textiles,” Layiwola said. “Certain processes are done by women, and others are done by men.”

For example, women used organic cassava starch and a feather to hand paint designs on one of the textiles on display, a piece of cloth intended to be worn wrapped around the wearer’s body.

“It took three weeks to finish the pattern on that wrapper,” Layiwola said. “On another textile, the design was made by men who thought it took too long when made by women. The men used stencils to speed up the process.”

Another theme that comes across in the video is the pride Africans take in the traditional textile styles associated with the region where they were raised. Fabric is strongly linked to cultural identity. Goshit says that he orders fabrics from Nigeria for clothes for his American-born grandchildren.

“We want to teach our children (that) you come from a culture, and you need to learn the culture,” he said.

The exhibit has already drawn members of the Corridor’s African communities to the museum, often wearing clothing made of the fabrics made in their homelands. And in a region known for its strong textile tradition — quilting — it’s not a surprise that the exhibit has a strong draw outside the African community.

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Besides promoting the exhibit, both Layiwola and Goshit encourage U.S.-born Iowans to ask African friends and acquaintances about their clothing when they wear African fabrics.

“It brings a connection. It’s a very good conversation starter,” Goshit said.

“Answering your questions is a way of talking about their culture,” Layiwola added. “It’s a matter of pride.”