blanket
- Museum number
- 2018,2036.379
- Description
-
Blanket; made of cotton. Weft-faced. Woven in ten wide strips, hand sewn together. Natural hand spun cotton warp and weft. Indigo-dyed cotton weft bands, aligned across warp strips at two ends and alternating to form checkerboard in centre. Supplementary weft float patterns in red, natural and indigo-dyed cotton; tapestry inserts in red and indigo-dyed cotton. Raw warp thread edges at both ends.
- Production date
- 1950s-1970s (circa)
- Dimensions
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Length: 221 centimetres
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Width: 106 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- This clot was acquired on the market in Accra, and had probably been collected in northern Ghana, where many cloths from Mali were traded.
Such chequerboard blankets were originally made both in Mali and later spread out from there into regional variations. Dr Duncan Clarke thinks that the majority of these odd variations on the blue and white tradition from Mali were woven in northern Ivory Coast by Dioula or "northern Mande" weavers for the Senufo and other groups outside Mali. In his view some of these patterns have been wrongly attributed to the West African coast (eg. the chequerboard blanket in the National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, accession number: 84-8-8, attributed to Vai people, Liberia: see Peggy Gilfoy, 'Patterns of Life, West African strip-weaving traditions', 1987, p.59).
- Location
- Not on display
- Condition
- Fair; local repair on front in natural hand spun cotton.
- Acquisition date
- 28 Nov 2018
- Acquisition notes
- Purchased by the donor in July 2010 from Duncan Clarke, Africa textile dealer/collector, in London.
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- 2018,2036.379
- Additional IDs
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Previous owner/ex-collection number: III.J8 (Griffiths-Rudoe collection number)