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Fowler Revisited

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Fowler Museum of Cultural History
UCLA – Westwood
March 16, 2017

Meredith went up to Westwood to attend a lecture, and stopped in at the Fowler Museum for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

The curators have rotated the pieces on display in the permanent collection quite a bit since our last visit, and there is a new video showing at the entrance to that collection. It reminds us that the items on display in the museum are not simply art objects but are also objects used which were used by the people who created them, and they are often of spiritual importance. Several of the museum items are shown in context in the video, which is interesting but a little long.

That gallery has numerous and varied items on display, including: Vietnamese tunics and skirts; decorated gourd bowls from Africa; large display masks from Papua New Guinea (seen in the photo); and Indonesian rod puppets, to name just a few categories. There is a large display of carved wooden posts made by the Yoruba people of Nigeria. They are similar in appearance to totem poles of North American peoples. Meredith was struck by an intricate modern Mexican ceramic piece, a memorial item entitled Tree of Death: Factory Women. The artist used a traditional Mexican tree of life to commemorate the over 400 women killed in Ciudad Juarez since 1993.

There are several special exhibitions running currently. The Fowler in Focus gallery features Joli! A Fancy Masquerade. That gallery displays approximately a dozen masquerade headdresses from Sierra Leone made in the 1970’s and used in street parades at that time. The headdresses incorporate symbols of native divinities, but also more modern symbols, taken from the British monarchy and from Islamic themes. That exhibition runs through July 16, 2017.

Another gallery features the Enduring Splendor exhibition of jewelry, both antique and modern, from the Indian Thar desert region. These pieces were created by jewelers of the Soni caste; some items were commissioned especially for the Fowler. That exhibition runs through June 18, 2017. The display complements the permanent collection of silver pieces from Europe and America, Reflecting Culture, which we like very much. Meredith stopped in it briefly at the end of her visit.

The final special exhibition running now is Pantsula 4 Lyf, a display featuring South African dance videos and photos

Meredith went on to dinner and then a lecture at the law school, given by Gary Saul Morson and sponsored by the Center for Liberal Arts and Free Institutions. Professor Morson spoke on Russian novelists, the intelligentsia, and the revolution of 1917.

Admission to the Fowler is free. Parking is available nearby, in one of the UCLA garages. The museum is all on one level and easily accessible to wheelchair patrons.

Fowler Museum — Native American Art

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Fowler Museum
UCLA Westwood
October 10, 2015

Fowler_group

We took Margaret to the Fowler Museum to see two new Native American exhibitions. We first saw Zuni World, a series of paintings displayed around the atrium. They were created by contemporary Zuni artists and feature traditional places, symbols, and subjects. We enjoyed the balance and colors and the fine details. Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon were each depicted in several paintings, reminding Margaret of visits she had made to those sites. This exhibit will run through January 10, 2016.

We then went into a gallery featuring textile art of the Southwest, mostly made in the period 1860-1880. This exhibit, Treasured Textiles from the American Southwest: the Durango Collection, was written up by Jessica Galt in the Los Angeles Times the same day we went, although we did not see the article until after we had been there. The majority of those pieces were blankets woven by Hopis and Navajos. Different designs were represented, and the display showed the evolution of designs over time. We were impressed with how vibrant the red pieces still are. The final pieces in the gallery were woven by Hispanic artists. Interspersed with the textile pieces were some historic photographs providing context, and there were good explanatory notes with each piece. This exhibit likewise runs through January 10, 2016.

Our final stop at the Fowler was a room displaying ancient Colombian pieces from the Magdalena Valley, both ceramic and metal, from about 900 to 1600 A.D. These pieces will be on exhibit through January 3, 2016. We did not spend much time in the permanent collection on this visit. It contains some excellent anthropological pieces from around the world, and also the splendid Francis E. Fowler, Jr. silver collection.

We had lunch before the museum visit, at an Italian café in the Anderson business school, Il Tramezzino, just a few buildings over from the museum. We each had a panini and enjoyed our meal. There were very few people in the restaurant when we arrived at noon, but as we finished a number of students crowded in. The restaurant is up a level from the museum, so we had to go into a classroom building and take an elevator up. We blundered into what turned out to be a service elevator letting us out in a kitchen, but the staff were quite nice and showed us the way through the kitchen out onto the Anderson plaza. After we ate we found the passenger elevator for our return trip, and a fellow passenger made sure we were oriented in the right direction to head back toward the Fowler.

Admission to the Fowler is free. There is a donation box at the entrance for those who wish to contribute. We parked in a nearby underground garage and paid $5 to park. There was ample parking for our Saturday visit; we do not know what the weekday parking situation may be.

Fowler_Zuni_video

Margaret was fairly talkative and alert at the beginning of our outing, and chatted with us about family over lunch. We reminded her that her oldest grandchild had a birthday coming up the following week, and helped her pick out a card in the museum gift shop. Margaret grew tired as the afternoon went on and was struggling a bit for words at the museum, but she did enjoy the videos there. The Zuni exhibit included a video explaining the origin of the art project, and showing several of the artists at work. She also watched two short videos in the permanent collection, one about potlatch ceremonies in British Columbia and the other about Hopi culture in the Southwest. She perked up a bit and joined in the conversation when we met up with Meredith’s sister Kathleen for coffee at the end of the day. The transfers from wheelchair to car and back remain hard for her, and we are now planning our outings so we can eat at or near whatever museum we visit, and not have to make an additional transfer. For smaller places that do not have a café on site, we may bring a picnic or get sandwiches to go.

Fowler Museum (UCLA)

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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.