(Re)Collecting: Southeast Asia at the Johnson Museum

Joseph Fischer is an expert on Indonesian art with a particular passion for Balinese story cloths. He taught for two years at Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta form 1956 to 1958. In the past he also worked as a Research Associate at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He first visited Bali in 1957 and returned multiple times after that. In 1994 during one of his visits Fischer first learned about Balinese story cloths. Fischer recounts one of his later trips to Bali when he walked into an antique shop in Sanur and encountered a five-foot-high stack of textiles. They were completely different from other artworks he had previously seen. These richly embroidered story cloths illustrate characters and scenes from the Mahabarata and Ramayana. The Balinese story cloths that Fischer collected and wrote about represent a very specific art form which was predominantly done by women living in the regions of Jembrana and Buleleng. Fischer also met a number of the women who practiced this tradition but many were no longer making story cloths. At that time the art form seemed to be losing interest and was no longer lucrative for the women who had been making them. The cloths were frequently used for special occasions, festivals, ceremonies and served a function as textile works and visual narratives in textile form and as offerings.

Because of his concern that the interest in story cloths and practice of making them was dwindling, Fischer bought as many of these works as he could during that trip. In addition to his extensive collection of story cloths, Joseph Fischer also collected different Balinese shadow puppets which are outlined in his book The Folk Art of Bali: The Narrative Tradition which was co-authored with Thomas Cooper. Many of these puppets are also included in the collection at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum. He is the author of several books including Threads of Tradition: Textiles from Indonesia, The Folk Art of Java, and Story Cloths of Bali. The latter book is Fischer’s most recent publication and it features many story cloths that are now part of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum and which were featured in the exhibition “Story Cloths of Bali” in 2006. The exhibition was curated by Ellen Avril and Professor Kaja McGowan and the Cornell Southeast Asia Program provided support for the exhibition and related programs. Following the exhibition, many of the story cloths featured in the exhibition became part of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum collection in 2007 where they currently reside today.