“...How the heck can anyone write at length about such a thing?”
August 17, 2009 Beautiful, handcrafted fabrics collected by President Obama’s mother are on display at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.
The late Ann Dunham began purchasing the hand-dyed textiles when she lived in Indonesia in the 1960s.
The colorful fabrics — known as batiks — are created by covering portions of cloth with molten wax, dying the cloth, and then scraping and re-applying more wax in different patters. The cloth is then dipped into a different color dye. These processes are repeated to produce intricate patterns and colors.
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-sister, remembers that back when she and big brother Barack lived in Jakarta, their mother wore batik almost every day.
“These batiks were seen on the street in the ‘60s; everybody wore batik” explains Mattiebelle Gittinger, a research associate at the Textile Museum. She says the fabrics probably cost $6 or $7 at the time.
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Courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng
Obama with his mother.
Courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng Obama with his mother.
Dunham didn’t buy fancy batiks — nothing antique, or party-ready. But Gittinger says Dunham had an educated eye, and her unusual beige, cocoa and coffee-colored batiks, with their elaborate white, black and dark blue patterns, were carefully chosen — not to mention frequently worn.
“She had clothing made of batiks to fit her dimensions — which were robust,” Soetoro-Ng says delicately. “And she would go and speak to the batik sellers and batik makers and she became very much a part of their lives and incorporated their stories into her love for the crafts.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111892135
I’ve made batiks. They are nothing exotic—I was doing them in high school in the 1960s. This makes it sound as if Stanley Ann was unearthing something New and Wonderful.