Bamboo is more than baskets at Crow Museum of Asian Art

The exhibition at the museum’s Dallas Arts District location features works from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

A-tisket , a-tasket, there’s so much more to bamboo than a basket. Twisted, Plaited, Sculpted: Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, an exhibition on view through October 17 at the Crow Museum of Asian Art’s Dallas Arts District location, highlights both the traditions of weaving bamboo as well as contemporary sculptural forms.

“Although the focus is bamboo, it's a wider scope about artists in Asia who focus on and use live plants,” said Dr. Natalia Di Pietrantonio, curator of the Crow Museum of Asian Art, who organized the exhibition.

The exhibition includes 22 works by 17 Japanese artists, including Living National Treasures Fujinuma Noboru and Fujitsuka Shosei.  This exhibition marks the museum’s first collaboration with the Dallas-based Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. Bamboo is embedded in Japanese culture, a common material used for utilitarian objects like baskets. The baskets in the exhibition show the thoughtful and creative process used to bend bamboo into something useful and beautiful.

“Although the basket may take three months to make, think about a year and a half, two years, it took them to cut that bamboo, dry that bamboo, because it has moisture, sugars, and they all have no particular formula. And then they usually start with the baskets from the bottom up. So, you can kind of see here, they'll start with the bottom rim, and then they build the walls, and then plate the weave around it,” Di Pietrantonio said.

Using their hands and a knife, artists work for years, observing a master, to learn how to manipulate bamboo into all sorts of shapes and use a variety of colors.

“It's through observation and sight, and prepping the bamboo sometimes years before they're even allowed to start plating. You can even see here the different weave structure here, the straight lines here, or some kind of more open, floral framework here, and each have distinct names, and they reference sometimes nature. Such as the lotus bud. And each one has a name and they specialize in a particular plating. And then there are about 600 species of bamboo, depending again where the bamboo grows. A lot of them use timber bamboo, but some of them, for instance, use tiger. They have different colors. Here, you see the full spectrum of the colors. There are reds and browns, but during the drying process, some of them will inject other natural dyes, such as from plum tree extract, and kind of other natural forms to create that vibrancy that you see before you,” Di Pietrantonio said.

The exhibition moves into more abstract works, twisting bamboo into an extraordinary array of shapes.

“You can again see the curvature and the different techniques that they're using here,” Di Pietrantonio said. “You can see the verticals here, almost arrow-shaped, versus here more of the straight basket shape. And a lot of them, because they are practicing in Kyushu, the very bottom of the archipelago, they're influenced by the environment. A lot of the shapes are based on the East Sea, on the ocean waves.”

Artists who move to the United States of America move further away from the basket form and utilitarian objects, experimenting with how to build certain forms and manipulate the bamboo.

“You can see they no longer even have to start from the bottom top. A lot of these artists start building that case, either with Styrofoam or other parts of bamboo to support, and they'll start with the section, and then they start feeling how the bamboo wants to be manipulated, and they create the shape around the individual section. They start drawing first as well, before they even build the back end, to create these unique shapes, so they don't have to start from the bottom top. And so, it becomes more sculptural in a way,” Di Pietrantonio said.

The exhibition also features wearable cane sculptures created by Shakuntala Kulkarni, an artist based in Mumbai, India. The inspiration behind this type of sculpture comes from the artist simply walking down the street in the busy city.

“One day she was walking the streets of Mumbai,” Di Pietrantonio said. “And as she was walking from the sky, she said molten tar fell down and almost engulfed her. So, she was always burnt. And no one said anything, and she had to continue on her way. So, she started thinking about not only physical harm that can come upon a human body, but what does it mean to be a woman in a city space, and how do you navigate that?”

Also included in the exhibition are photos and videos of the artist wearing a cane sculpture in urban Mumbai as onlookers stare at her unusual appearance.

“She wanted to create both an armor for protection, as well as a symbol of a cage. So, you can see how large the works are from her body. She saw them as wearable sculptures, like many of these artists who consider the work of sculpture first and foremost,” Di Pietrantonio said.

Armour for the Bride dominates a gallery space, with its delicate details mimicking elements of bridal wear.  Kulkarni is questioning the institution of marriage. Does marriage represent safety for women or is it a trap?

“She's talking about the marital ritual act wedding as perhaps people imagine it as or as a respite away from harm, but does it actually offer the protection to women as it is hoped for?” Di Pietrantonio said.

Learn more: Crow Museum of Asian Art