Soft Diplomacy

Description

Soft Diplomacy

January 9- March 24, 2017

Soft Diplomacy, curated by Stephanie Beck Cohen, explores quilts made in Liberia, West Africa, and gifted across the Atlantic Ocean as part of cultural diplomacy with the United States. An artistic tradition carried to Liberia with American settlers in the nineteenth century, in the following centuries quilts serve as both an anchor to their American heritage and a medium through which Liberian women visualize their daily lives and their nation’s histories and present.  The exhibit demonstrates the strength, endurance, and changing nature of textiles and the relationships between the women who make them, their patrons, and collaborators. The exhibition brings together Liberian quilts used in political exchange, depicting political and national themes for the first time, highlighting the works of Liberian women from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who shaped representations of their nation and visualized cultural memory and trauma before, during and after Liberia’s civil war.