Woven Narratives: Textiles as Living Archives was on view from May 2025 to April 2026 at the Stanford Archaeology Center. While I was Curator and Assistant Director of Collections of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections, I led the creation of this exhibition, which I co-curated with students in my Spring 2025 “Introduction to Museum Practice” course and realized with the support of a team of staff and interns. The exhibit brought together anthropological and archaeological collections to explore how textiles preserve and communicate stories of heritage, identity, and cultural exchange.
Exhibit Description: Textiles are intimate creations, worn on our bodies or otherwise integrated into daily life. They serve as functional and decorative items while also acting as dynamic archives of cultural history, memory, and identity. Highly skilled and labor-intensive processes are involved in their creation, from preparing fiber materials to weaving to ornamental techniques like embroidery.
Woven Narratives unravels stories of textiles from different cultural contexts. The exhibition pulls from the permanent collection of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections, featuring anthropological and archaeological textiles and objects related to textile production from diverse communities in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Thailand, Japan, and the Philippines. Textiles are archives of heritage and identity, technique and style, oppression and resistance, and relationships among people and between people and environments. Woven Narratives traces thematic threads that illustrate enduring and evolving textile traditions and practices.
