Special Exhibition Archives - Thomas Murray Asian & Tribal Art

Ceremonial Long Cloth with battle scene from Ramayana tale detail

Indian Trade Cloth & Fragments

offered as a complete collection to curators and collectors

I collected most of the 49 pieces in this group more than 25 years ago in Indonesia. They are divided by the ‘taste’ of the region where they were found, with Sulawesi and Sumatra being of primary importance. The collection also includes textiles found in, or to the taste of, Thailand, Japan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Persia, and Europe, plus an exceptional block-printed cloth from Kashgar, Western China. Added to this is an extremely rare group of historic archeological fragments from Fustat, Egypt, that came out of the ground more than a century ago. It was my goal to survey of the range of Indian Trade Cloths (ITC), inclusive of early Gujarati block prints and hand-painted mordant- and resist-dyed cloths from the Coromandel Coast. Created in India for export often more than 250 years ago, these textiles served as currency in exchange for spices and other trade goods and are now recognized as important aesthetic and art historical documents of world exploration and trade.

Cotton and silk textiles created in India have held the world in thrall for more than two millennia. Blessed with advantageous soil and weather conditions, the cultivation of cotton (Gossypium arboreum, Gossypium herbaceum), silkworms and dyestuffs came naturally to the environment of the subcontinent. Human ingenuity took care of the rest.

Learning how to spin and dye thread and weave cloth on simple looms came first. Over time, dyeing methods and loom architecture became more complex, permitting a greater variety of sophisticated textiles. We encounter ikat, double-ikat, block-stamping and/or hand-painted and resist-dye patterning techniques.

Recipes evolved to achieve a broad range of colorfast hues and shades. The proteinaceous nature of silk accepts dye far more readily than the cellulosic fibers of cotton that require using naturally occurring chemical mordants to ‘tan’ the cotton in such a manner that a red dye would bond with the cotton fiber only where the mordant is painted and nowhere else. A fermented and oxidized tincture of indigo, the source of blue, was the exception and could be applied directly to the cotton surface. The use of different mordants or their concentrations produced a range of colors from purple red to rose. Alum salts and cow’s urine could be used for fixing the dye or bleaching the dyed cloth back to white. Wood blocks with design patterning could be used to apply mordants or dyes directly. A wax resist might be applied with a pen (kalam), a craft technique from which kalamkari, the Indo-Persian name for these printed textiles, comes. Chintz is an alternative name used in the West that derives from the Hindu word chint, meaning spotted or variegated.

Both cotton and silk trade cloths woven in India were being made by Jains in Gujarat, traded by Arabs and kept as heirlooms by head-hunting tribes in Indonesia. They were exchanged for spices by traders long before the Portuguese and Dutch arrived. Some cotton cloths of sari length that feature patterns of birds, leaves, hunters and dancers, were found with ink stamps written in archaic Islamic scripts that gave a radiocarbon date of 14th–15th century and are now found in museum around the world.

The Portuguese, led by Afonso de Albuquerque, arrived in Indonesia in 1511 after conquering Malacca to dominate the lucrative spice trade. As the first Europeans to reach the archipelago, they sought cloves, nutmeg, and mace, establishing forts and trading posts in Maluku, Solor, and Flores before being largely displaced by the Dutch in the early 1600s. The Dutch, led by Cornelis de Houtman, first arrived in Indonesia in 1596, seeking spice trade routes, which led to the establishment of the VOC in 1602. Initially focused on trade, the Dutch gradually colonized the archipelago over 350 years, establishing a major colony known as the Dutch East Indies before Indonesia declared independence in 1945.

As John Guy observed in Woven Cargoes, his seminal 1998 volume on Indian Trade Cloth, the dyed cotton cloths were stronger and survived from an earlier age in greater numbers than the more fragile silk double ikat. They also served all levels of the market from low-cost productions to high value luxuries. The great variety of surviving patterns, including pieces of great age, serves as a comprehensive visual and historical record of the ancient trade in Indian textiles to Southeast Asia and Japan. These textiles played a multifaceted role in the regions they reached, serving as royal attire, prestigious diplomatic gifts, and sacred ceremonial objects and served as a currency in trade exchange.

Only a few echoes of early textile patterns survive to this day in India itself. The Thomas Murray Collection, now the finest in private hands in the Americas, serves as a compendium through time of Indian Trade Cloths, myth, magic and motifs.

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Gold Collection

Indonesian and Philippine jewellery of exceptional merit are being offered as a collection.

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Alpacas and Llamas Collection

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February 22-28, 2025

VIRTUAL SHOW

In the recent publication, Textiles of Indonesia, Valerie Hector informs us that shells have been used in Southeast Asia as both ornament and currency for Millenia. Oliva shell beads were found in an archaeology site of Timor dating to circa 35,000 years ago and Nassarius shell beads were found in the same area dating to 4500 BCE.

Despite the emergence of the glass trade bead industry some two thousand years ago, hand fashioned shell disks continued to serve as a primary way of storing value and signaling prestige up through the 20th century for many ethnic groups of Southeast Asia and Oceania. This was owing to the extraordinary labor intensiveness in shell bead creation, and the principle that the further from the sea, the greater the value for all artifacts made from shell.

This small exhibition features shell artwork from some of the most legendary headhunting peoples of Asia,

including the greatest shell-decorated garment in the world from the Atayal of Taiwan; a blouse decorated with mother of pearl shell beads from the B’laan of Mindanao, Philippines; an early warrior’s cape from the Naga with appliqued cowrie shells, making a human figure amid circles; and an extraordinary Naga necklace fashioned from giant clam, both from the northeastern highlands of India.

It is a pleasure to share this deeply meaningful group with you!

41789 – Canopa Stone Votive Container

41776 – Canopa Stone Votive Container

41775 – Canopa Rare Wood Votive Container

41774 – Canopa Rare Wood Votive Container

41741 – Vessel with Alpaca Head

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Ainu and Aboriginal Taiwan Vintage Postcards

Vintage Postcard Collections

ainu cards

Taiwan CARDS

Ainu Ethnography

Vintage ethnographic postcards are far from trivial memorabilia; they often offer the best photographic documentation we have of remote cultures in their intact state.
They were a very effective means of conveying what a traveler was seeing at a time when few people owned a camera.

The images tend to date from the later 19th Century until the 1920s, when camera ownership became more widespread, and exotic postcards went out of fashion.  The Ainu are a small population of Paleo-Mongoloid racial stock living on the most northerly island of Japan, Hokkaido, as well as the lower half of the Russo-Siberian island of Sakhalin; the Ainu formerly inhabited the Kuril Islands but were evacuated to Hokkaido after WWII.

Ainu language, belief systems, tattoos and hirsute appearance are very distinct from that of the dominate Japanese society to the south and for this they bore much discrimination. Ainu means “man” in their own language but their historic name in proper Japanese translates as “descendants of dogs.” And yet DNA tests demonstrate that they in fact descend from the ancient Jomon peoples, the first arrivals to Japan, dating back 10,000 years. The Ainu are considered to be one of the earliest continuous world cultures with only the Australian Aborigines and the San (Kalahari Bushmen) being in this select group.

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Aboriginal Taiwan

Taiwan’s original inhabitants are frequently known as Formosan Aborigines, a name derived from the island’s old name, Formosa. Theorists believe that they have lived there for at least 8,000 years. During the last ice age, the sea separating the Asian mainland and nearby islands like Taiwan became very shallow and relatively easy to cross by small boats or perhaps even by walking across.   

Over time, there came to be 16 recognized tribes (and 12 not recognized), the most prominent being the Paiwan, the Rukai, and the Atayal. They share linguistic commonalities not only with each other but also with the Philippines, Borneo, the outer Indonesian islands, Madagascar to the west and Hawaii and other Polynesian islands to the east. Their sea journey began some 4,000 years ago as local island hopping and progressed to giant outriggers able to explore the vast Pacific, with the last discovery being New Zealand around the 12th Century; one of the greatest diasporas the world has ever known, the Austronesian Expansion all began in Taiwan and the present day Formosan Aboriginal tribes are thought to be the Austronesians that stayed behind.

Ethnic Han from the Chinese mainland have colonized the island since the 17th Century, progressively displacing the indigenous population from the more desirable coast towards the more inaccessible highlands. That remoteness helped preserve culture, as well as a fierce reputation for headhunting. The Japanese took Formosa as a trophy of war from the Chinese in 1895 and held it as a colony until 1945. Most old postcards date to this pre-War period. They not only convey visual information about the culture and lifeway of the people depicted, on another level, they are vehicles of socio-political propaganda. Postcard images can reinforce the not so subtle message that these savages need to be tamed and assimilated “for their own good…” and thereby justify an occupation by foreign overlords.

For education only / Postcards are not for sale

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Boro Collection

16 Boro garments and flat cloths of exceptional merit are being offered as a collection.

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Dayak Charms Collection

Dayak charms are a most fascinating subject. I am not sure if they captured me, or I captured them. Presented here is the result of more than forty years of collecting that I now wish to share with you.

Just looking at their great aesthetic variety is very compelling. But the more one knows about the cultural and historical context of Dayak charms, the greater their appreciation.

Borneo is the world’s third largest island, following Greenland and Papua New Guinea. It is politically divided by three nations: the largest territory being Kalimantan, of Indonesian; two states are part of Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah; and the small but oil rich sultanate, Brunei. It is common to distinguish between the coastal inhabitants, including Malays, Javanese, Buginese, Chinese, and Arabs, and the indigenous peoples of the island’s interior. Collectively known as Dayak, these indigenous ethnic groups share in a multiplicity of Malayo-Polynesian dialects, a subset of the greater Austronesian language family extending from Madagascar to Easter Island.

The Dayaks include the Iban, Bidayuh, Kayan, Kenyah, Bahau, Ngaju, Ot Danum, Penan, Maloh, Barito, Kelabit-Lun Bawang, and Dusun-Kadazan-Murut, amongst many other sub-tribes. They have independent but at times overlapping cultural customs, social hierarchies, and pre-missionary religious belief systems. Animism is a belief that spirits inhabit stones, trees, mountains, rivers, plants and animals. There are gods that are good and help with bringing in a good harvest, for example. That said, there are also malevolent ghosts everywhere that can cause great trouble. Most of the time, such evil spirits may be kept at bay with powerful magic. All ethnic groups make use of protective charms.

The Dayak will often live in longhouses extending along mighty rivers or up in the highland forests. They hunt, fish, and practice slash and burn agriculture. Most, but not all, of the Dayak were feared headhunters. They were known for their tattoos, shields, masks, textiles, and beadwork.

Living in the deep rainforest, the Dayak are great sculptors. Surrounded by giant trees, they are known for carving guardian sculptures of grand scale, known as hampatong. These formidable figures can reach twelve or more feet (four meters) in height. Ancestral in nature, they stand in front of the longhouse defending against threats to the living by the dead.

But giant statues are but one of the sculpture traditions of the Dayak. It is in their miniature charms that Dayak carving genius truly presents itself. Humans take on all shapes, forms, and facial expressions, in a most compelling manner. We encounter totemic animals, birds, and a priest’s shield. Ranging in size from one inch to ten inches, ( 2.5- 25 cm) such amulets were known to ward off evil spirits and malevolent ghosts. They were used on baby carriers to protect the child; placed in rice paddies to encourage growth; worn on necklaces by shamans; used for hunting magic; served as medicine for healing; were tops to bamboo ritual containers; and were present during rituals of birth, puberty, marriage, and funerals, where malevolent ghosts need be kept at a distance.

Charms can be sculpted from wood, bone, horn, stone and metal to name but a few materials. We encounter great creativity in amulets fashioned from found objects; a root complex lends itself to wild flights of fancy. The sheer variety of facial expressions, often with humor or angst, makes each charm enchanting.