Art at Watson’s latest exhibition — “Odisha Illuminated: A Celebration of Ritual in a Modern World” — offers insight into the multigenerational craft of colorful appliqué panels in Odisha and the importance of women in their creation.
The exhibition, which opened on March 4, will be on display through June 1 in Stephen Robert ’62 Hall.
During the exhibition’s opening reception and panel on March 5, event attendees heard from the exhibition’s curator, Rakhi Jain, a high school senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Vibha Pingle, an adjunct lecturer in international and public affairs.
Presenting the textiles — which are known locally as chandua — “in an academic and public policy setting like the Watson Institute invites us to consider how cultural heritage is sustained, whose labor is valued and how living traditions can be supported without being reduced to commodities or being frozen as artifacts of the past,” Jain said at the panel.
The exhibition invites viewers to consider “craft as a way to empower women” and to look at art, not just as a commodity, but as a way to express and honor the creator’s identity, Pingle said at the panel.
Watson Communications Specialist Pete Bilderback, who also serves on the Art at Watson committee, said that the goal of the exhibition is to raise “awareness of the status of women globally.”
Jain grew up in Odisha, India, surrounded by the colorful panels, which are often used in rituals and displayed in temples. During the opening event, she recalled the “geometric forms and repeating symbols” with “colors and shapes (which) are dictated by tradition.”
The appliqué tradition is centered in Pipili, a town in Odisha. “Were you ever to drive through Pipili, you would find the main street a kaleidoscope of color with thousands of fabric panels hanging from the shop fronts,” Jain said at the event.
Jain noted that the patterns use a “shared visual grammar” which is “critical for passing down stories … in a community that until the late 19th century was largely illiterate.”
Jain explained that the textiles — which are colored by pigments derived from natural sources — are made primarily by women.
Men typically are responsible for the “selling and decision-making” and women do the manual labor, Jain said. She explained that men typically cannot create these fabrics because the skill has been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries.
“I feel like that’s a very powerful thing,” Bilderback said in an interview with The Herald. “Knowing that the techniques that were used to create (the panels) have been handed down from mother to daughter over generations.”
Intentionally taking in artwork that has been created by hand for so long is “a respite from so much of what we’re kind of subjected to in terms of visual culture right now,” Bilderback said.
While the practice of making fabrics has become commercialized, the exhibition at Watson displays more traditional panels.
Female fabric weaving has a long history, dating back to 1500 BCE in Crete, Greece, Pingle said. While fabrics often brought economic prosperity to cities and towns, they also had functional and communicative uses, Pingle explained.
In Oaxaca, Mexico, for example, women weave ceremonial huipils, garments worn as attire that “demonstrate to the world what one’s identity is,” Pingle said. In Mali, women express themselves and communicate with each other through zigzag textiles called mud cloths, also known as bògòlanfini, she added.
Throughout history, “the very act of creating that fabric art is defining one’s sense of identity,” Pingle added.
“I feel like that’s a very powerful thing knowing that this is all done by hand,” Bilderback added. “It’s very human.”
Millie Barter is a senior staff writer covering RISD.
