Fowler Museum
November 29, 2014
Westwood
We went to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History on the UCLA campus. It is a small to midsize facility which at any given time shows several special exhibitions and also has two galleries devoted to items from its permanent collections. The main focus of our visit this time was a set of exhibitions with textiles as the theme. In a press release last summer, the museum’s curators referred to it as a “textile trifecta”, and so it was.
The first exhibition we looked at was Bearing Witness: Embroidery as History in Post-Apartheid South Africa, which featured some hand embroidered modern pieces made in South Africa. They were mounted on the walls around the central atrium, and we strolled along looking at each piece in turn.
We then saw Yards of Style, a display of African print cloths from Ghana. The bright colors were a feast for the eyes. The explanatory material in the gallery described the different manufacturing methods and contrasted qualities of the higher end fabrics, made in the Netherlands and in Africa, with the less expensive ones made in China. There was an interesting array of prints, from traditional geometric and abstract designs to common everyday items like cell phones and clothespins.
We next went into the exhibition called Textiles of Timor, Island in the Woven Sea. The gallery featured many hand woven items, both women’s tube skirts and men’s shoulder cloths. There were several videos playing inside the exhibition, with interviews of native weavers and displays of the dyeing and weaving processes.
Margaret particularly liked the hand embroidered pieces and the videos showing the hand weaving process in Timor.
The Fowler sometimes showcases a modern artist, and this time was no exception. We strolled through World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou. There were some interesting pieces, but all in all it was not really to our taste.
We decided not to visit the anthropological permanent collection gallery this time, but we did revisit the Francis E. Fowler Jr. silver collection, which we have seen several times before. It includes a number of strikingly beautiful pieces both American and European.
Admission is free, but visitors have to pay for parking. We parked in the hourly parking section of parking structure 4, off Sunset Boulevard, as recommended on the museum website. From the underground garage a visitor can take either the elevator or the stairs up to the plaza level, and it is a short walk to the museum from there. After our visit to the museum we strolled around the campus a little bit, over to the campus store and to visit the UCLA Bruin statue, then back to our car.