“Southeast Asian Ritual Textiles” April 15 – June 17 Collector’s Notes by Dan Carlson

My collecting began in the late 1960s when an uncle gave me a small rock collection. Around that time I also began collecting and studying the fossils I found among the Upper Pennsylvanian limestone formations near my North Kansas City, MO home. My rock collecting persisted throughout my college years in New Mexico, but waned after I moved to the Bay Area in the early 1980s.

Inspired by a trip to Egypt in the late 1980s, I began acquiring Sotheby’s and Christies antiquity auction catalogs and would bid on the least expensive items. I would occasionally win and thus began a small antiquities collection. I also frequented thrift stores as far back as the early 1980s and began collections of mid-century modern furniture, appliances, textiles, clothing, and art.

During my travels to many Third World countries (most of the world happens to be third world!) I developed an interest in ritual or sacred items – things that indigenous peoples used for ceremonies – not art made for art’s sake or for sale to tourists. As a result, I have collected a smattering of ritual art from all over the globe, including Meso-American pottery and African wood carvings.

I spent a week in Bali in the mid 1990s after ten weeks of independent travel through Mongolia, China, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia. An art dealer friend of mine who lives in Ubud introduced me to Indonesian ritual textiles and I had the chance to acquire several pieces – all sacred, some almost 100 years old.

These pieces, plus some textile fragments I acquired in northern Laos, comprise the core of my ritual textile collection. All of them had specific ritual purposes that have been well documented, though some of the peoples who created my Ibanic pieces are still a mystery. My moth-eaten Balinese textiles are of types so sacred, that even the smallest shreds are preserved and used in religious offerings.

I find it particularly compelling that some of these textiles required the weavers to enter a trance before approaching the loom. The patterns and symbols in these textiles have the ability to convey this depth of mysticism, and I am pleased to be able to share my modest collection with my fellow Peninsulans.