Cloth & Clay: Communicating Culture

Cloth & Clay: Communicating Culture explores over 2,000 years of Mexican Central and South American history and tells some of the stories belonging to the descendants of ancient weavers and potters through ceramic artifacts from the Mexican, Central, and south American collections of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art with related textile artifacts from the collections of the Textile Museum of Canada. Through electronic networks, images and ideas from the world’s cultural heritage can be brought together in a virtual exhibition, exemplifying how cultural institutions can successfully weave the presentation of ancient artifacts with new technology to provide insight into the cultural importance of the artifacts held in our collections. The website Cloth & Clay: Communicating Culture (www.textilemuseum.ca/cloth_clay) is a joint project funded by the Virtual Museum of Canada. Items that are rarely seen outside of museum storage facilities are featured in an interactive, image-rich environment, creating a path of discovery and enabling visitors to place ancient artifacts into narrative stories and enter a process of discovery through the web site and CD-ROM.  A physical counterpart to this virtual exhibition has been mounted at the Textile Museum of Canada, presenting some of the objects featured on the web site and the relationships discovered among them.  

Type: Exhibition

Date: Aug 28, 2002, 8am - Feb 16, 2003, 5pm

Curated by: Roxane Shaughnessy