Review of Fashion Cities Africa exhibition and Creating African Fashion Histories Conference

Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph by James Pike

Over a hundred people attended the Creating African Fashion Histories conference at a Brighton Museum & Art Gallery venue on 4 November where fourteen speakers summarised their recent work on particular periods and places in African fashion with a strong accent on the contemporary. For example, Jody Benjamin from the University of California talked about 18^th and 19^th century cloth trades and costume trends from surviving prints and a few rare pieces, Christopher Richards of Brooklyn College focused on 1960s Ghana, and Juliet Gilbert from the University of Birmingham gave us the insights from her recent PhD on young seamstresses producing clothes for ‘the classy girl’ in Kalabar, Nigeria. Erica de Greef has worked in the field of fashion for many years in South Africa and has recently been examining de-colonisation possibilities in the combined South African fashion collections of the Cape Town museums now grouped together as IZIKO. She investigated men’s button decorated trousers as a particular example. Angela Jansen, a visiting researcher at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has combed Paris, and Casablanca for sources on 20^th century Moroccan fashion history and shared her online findings of fabulous photographs from the 1970s post the more traditional work by Jean Besancenot. The final panel included the transformative fashion entrepreneur Avis Charles, a key organiser of African Fashion International in Johannesburg, the journalist Helen Jennings, and Moroccan scene experts Yoseph Ouechen and Mouna Belgrini.

Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph by James Pike

The day ended with an opportunity to view the Fashion Cities Africa exhibition which celebrates the current scene with contributions from designers from four cities: Nairobi, Casablanca, Lagos and Johannesburg.  This exhibition is on until 8 January 2017. The designers from each city are introduced by a fashion expert ‘curator’, and information on the city and the fashion scene is provided on four sided pillars and by short films. There is also a handling corner with long swathes of fabric to touch and other interactives. The range of styles was impressive and mesmerising. The exhibition booklet is also photo rich and info-snappy, and intended to have a wider circulation than the exhibition itself which is likely to go on to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.

Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph by James Pike

The international fares for many of the speakers were supported by the Sussex Africa Centre at the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton, both of which are key partners in the project. Moving on from the V&A’s Black Style exhibition co-curated by Carol Tulloch in 2004, Africa Remix at the South Bank Centre in 2005, and the ‘We Face Forward’ African art and music season in Manchester in 2012, this exhibition covers modern African fashion in a lot more detail and the structure of co-curation is broader and more reflective of the industry it portrays. Several UK museums have small collections of post-independence African fashion amongst their holdings but this exhibition and the conference (which will result in a publication) is a stunning new bench mark.

It’s whetted my appetite for seeing South Africa – Art of a Nation at the British Museum, on until 26 February 2017

Antonia Lovelace 

4 November 2016

Giving tribute to lacemakers – notes from International Bobbin Lacemaking Festival in Bobowa, Southern Poland

The beginning of October is a festive time for the lacemaking community of Bobowa in Southern Poland. Since 2000, delegates from European countries have been participating in the International Bobbin Lacemaking Festival organized by the local community. The event’s role is to celebrate lacemaking heritage. The festival exposes the diversity of patterns and skills, whilst for the Bobowa’s community is a distinctive moment of being recognized nationally and internationally linking lacemaking traditions through historical times and across geographical regions.

Czech stall with motifs from fashion show 'Dream of the Sea' by Prague lacemakers. Photo by Beatra Jarema. 

Lacemaking, historically, was considered as a manual skilled job, linked with a cottage industry, and referring to the social class of workers: artisans, who were from rural areas working in a particular place as a collective, linked by the kinship bounds and belonging to particular region, with the generational transfer of labour skills and tools. This constructed tradition of labour in the region can be situated in the broader term of regional ‘heritage,’ where work obtained a particular timeless value, because of the persistence of labour forms, tools and materials, techniques and particular skills; due to their continuing work, women, who immersed lacemaking into their collective and individual biographies, allowed for the natural transfer of the skills into their environment. The festival is a result of historical processes commemorating women’s work, preserving regional heritage constructed by women’s labour and linking local craftswomen with other lacemaking communities.

Jadwiga Wegorek from Cracow, Poland, with her award winning lace with at the Bobowa festival.  Photo by Beatra Jarema.

The 17^th International Bobbin Lacemaking Festival was held on the 6th - 9^th October, Poland, gathering 19 groups from 14 countries: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, England, Estonia, France, Holland, Hungary, Russia, Slovakia, which represented their laces and lacemaking skills on the stalls. The Programme included lacemaking fashion shows by Czech and Polish designers, lacemaking workshops for beginners, exhibition by Prague lacemakers Iva Proškova and Jitka Egermaierova von Lindern, and a lecture on laces in fine arts by textiles curator, Joanna Sielska. All events were underpinned by contemporary folk music from local bands, which emphasized the rural character of Bobowa’s town and rural origins of Bobowa’s lacemaking industry in the region. A few years ago the village of Bobowa became a small town with great ambition to be a centre for Uplands craft culture, meanwhile renovating its Post-Socialist landscape, providing modern investments and preserving local multicultural heritage expressed by architectural forms: mansion houses, churches and a synagogue. The festival is a great occasion for visitors to learn about the Uplands past and present, whilst also to understand the status of contemporary bobbin lace in the broader international context. Symbolic value of women’s work expressed by a monument of the lacemaker situated in Bobowa’s Main Square could also be studied in relation to the works awarded during the National Lacemaking Contest where Slavonic, Czech and Free Style laces demonstrated both dialogue with tradition and transformations of skills into modern forms.  

Examples of lace from the UK at the Bobowa festival Photo by Beatra Jarema. 

Great Britain’s lacemaking heritage was represented by lacemakers from Kent in England exhibiting originally designed or reconstructed laces in torchon, Bedfordshire lace and Buck point lace styles.

By Anna Sznajder

Images: Beata Jarema

Pacific Collections at Greenwich

On the 9th of September a small number of MEG members gathered at the Royal Museums Greenwich stores to share knowledge and expertise on the Museum's Pacific collections. A new Pacific gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich will open in May 2018. Work on selecting objects for the new displays and interpretation has begun in earnest and will include objects collected on voyages during British maritime exploration in the 18th and 19th centuries. The new displays will provide opportunity to include through collaboration with Pacific communities indigenous voices and make way for new understanding of these significant collections.

Call for Papers: Museological Review, Issue 21: Museums and Partnership

Submission Deadline: 1700 GMT, Monday 5 December 2016

Museological Review (MR) is a peer-reviewed journal, published annually, by the community of PhD students of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. It is aimed at graduated Masters students, PhD students and early career researchers from around the world and from any museum-related discipline. It is a forum for the exchange of museological ideas and for the development of academic skills.
Museological Review Issue 21 takes as its theme the concept of Partnership. Today organisations across the cultural and heritage sectors are actively encouraged to work more creatively, especially in partnership with other institutions, organisations and businesses. How can such work shape, enhance, develop or alter the nature of the museum in the 21st century? How do partnerships realign or repurpose the boundaries of what a museum is? And how do they implicate the museum in cultural, political and ethical debates?
This call for papers welcomes submissions on the theme of partnership, addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:

How can museums work creatively with other organisations in order to amplify and strengthen their work?
How can allied sectoral professions such as libraries and archives help shape the role of museums in today’s society?
How do museums demonstrate their relevance to society through both typical and atypical partnerships?
How can museums respond to issues of social diversity and social justice through partnership working?
How can museums balance issues of risk and reward in the development of their partnerships?
How can museums address the ethical implications of working with new and diverse partners?
How can partnerships contribute to establishing legacy in museums?
How might partnerships shape the very nature of what a museum is, and how might this contribute to what the future museum looks like?

There are a number of ways to engage with Museological Review this year.

Written Submissions
The editors welcome submissions of academic articles (maximum 5,000 words). We also encourage creative and alternative formats including exhibition or book reviews (maximum 1,000 words).

Visual Submissions
The editors welcome visual submissions comprising a single image which depicts the theme of partnership with museums. The image can be manipulated and edited. A title and a short caption of 150 words or less should enhance the message but the image must be able to communicate on its own merit. Visual submissions must be original work. Any identifiable persons depicted must agree to allow their image to be published. Please submit your image as a .jpeg or .tif file to a resolution of 600 dpi. Please submit your caption in a Microsoft Word document.

Question & Answer
This year there is a single Question to which Answers are encouraged. In up to 250 words, please provide a critical opinion to the question:
What kinds of partnerships are appropriate or not appropriate for museums to engage with?
Please include your current professional and/or academic status (for example, curator, freelance, researcher) and the country in which you work. If you prefer your contribution to remain anonymous, please clearly state this in your submission.

Results
The editorial team will contact authors in January 2017. The editorial process (peer review and editing) of those accepted submissions will take place from January to April 2017. Final publication decisions will be made after the peer review and editing process. The issue is due to be available from the Museological Review web page by June 2017. 

New MA in Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies launched

An exciting new Masters programme has been launched at SOAS. This is an innovative interdisciplinary degree, convened and taught jointly in the Department of Anthropology and School of Arts. It brings together anthropological, art historical and archaeological perspectives to explore the interconnecting fields of museums, heritage and material culture studies. The MA disprivileges Western museum and heritage discourses and practices, and explores tangible and intangible cultural heritage as spheres of global interaction.

The programme, which is being led by Professor Paul Basu (Anthropology) and Dr Louise Tythacott (History of Art & Archaeology), will equip students with a theoretically-informed critical understanding of museums, heritage and material/visual culture, and provides an opportunity for students to engage in current debates in World Art and World Heritage. Students will be introduced to a wide range of thematic and theoretical issues, and will have the opportunity to curate a small exhibition in the Curating Cultures module, and put into practice anthropological research techniques in the Ethnographic Research Methods course.

Situated in London’s ‘Museum Mile’, a few hundred meters from the British Museum, and with its own Brunei Gallery, SOAS provides a unique environment in which to study the cultural heritage of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and to place this heritage within transnational/transcultural contexts.

The MA is available as a 1-year full time, or 2-year part-time, programme. Applications are now being invited for entry from September 2017. Full details about the programme are available on the SOAS website. Enquiries should be directed to Paul Basu or Louise Tythacott