TRACING THREADS OF HISTORY: Rediscovering Indonesian Textiles at the Brooklyn Museum

Abstract

Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research, exhibit, and engage collections. Using recent research into one Balinese slendang in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, this essay examines how the Museum’s frameworks and curatorial assumptions enabled the neglect of nearly 200 Indonesian textiles for decades. It examines how the Museum parsed collection categories, how Indonesian textiles complicated and confounded those categories, and how the ensuing inattention inadvertently enabled a well-preserved collection. By attempting to weave the textiles’ collecting histories into narratives of their embedded colonial and institutional histories, it hopes to rekindle their usefulness for scholars, for communities, and for the Museum.