upcycled cotton, cotton thread

West Bengal-Bangladesh; ca. early-mid 20th century

80 x 53.5″ [2.03 x 1.36m]

condition: good; slight discolorations consistent with age and use

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The Bengali folk quilts of this collection are works from the early to mid-20th century, coming from the regions of West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. They are part of a centuries-old tradition that continues as alive today as it was hundreds of years ago, carried from generation to generation by a long line of anonymous women. Belonging to the same type of craft making tradition as the Japanese Boro textiles and Alabama’s Gee’s Bend quilts, which consists on the reutilization of old pieces of fabric by having these pieces re-woven to form a new object: a quilt destined to keep people warm and to give usage to these textile fragments. This is a tradition as old as thriftiness and necessity are, but sometimes, somewhere, a group of quilters hits upon something particularly remarkable: so did the quiltmakers of Bengal.

Made using the same simple, straight-running kantha stitch to join together three to seven layers of fabric (their variable thickness depends on the coldness of the climate where they were made), Bengali folk quilts are distinguishable for their lack of batting. This approaches them more to the aforementioned Boro tradition of textiles, and contrasts with Gee’s Bend and traditional American or European quilts, which do contain batting as an element of their making.

As other forms of art that have arisen from practical necessity rather than from a purely artistic endeavor, and that, whether this is wanted or not, make with their sole presence a commentary on the socioeconomic conditions that brought about their creation as objects of folk art, these quilts belong at the same time to the spheres of practicality and of creativity; they are both objects of craft and objects of art. It is impossible to separate these quilts from their origins in the harshest conditions of life, and to avoid their principal meanings as objects made to face these conditions, both through their usefulness and their beauty. The individual struggles, the resourcefulness, and the natural, intuitive sense of composition of their creators remains instilled within each pattern and texture of these quilts, making of each an irreplaceable object of art, and, a masterwork in its own right.

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