The Stanley Museum’s latest exhibit represents African culture through clothing

“Weaving Narratives: African Textiles in Iowa” explored the relationship between African culture and the Stanley Museum.

Hannah Childers, Arts Reporter

November 12, 2025

Ava Neumaier

Djerban cloth, a silk from Tunisia, is seen behind the Weaving Narratives exhibit at the Stanley Art Museum in Iowa City on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. The exhibit showcased tapestries and cloth from African artists, accompanied by videos that explained the significance of the pieces. (Ava Neumaier/The Daily Iowan)

Storytelling comes in all forms. In the Stanley Museum’s latest exhibit, entitled “Weaving Narratives,” it comes in the form of textiles curated from different African cultures throughout Iowa. The exhibit will be displayed until April 29, 2026.

Curator of African Art Cory Gundlach, Ph.D, organized this exhibit alongside his colleague and Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Peju Layiwola, Ph.D, as part of a larger project, the Mellon Project for Provenance Research. Gundlach said the goal of the exhibit is to strengthen the relationship between the museum and the African community in Iowa.

Curators Sunday Goshit, Ph.D, Anne Kiche, Ph.D, and Walla Osman are representatives of the African community in Iowa and helped establish the central theme of communication through textiles, Gundlach said.

One of the textiles featured in the exhibit is known as kanga, a one to two-part garment with messages displayed on brightly colored fabric. Kanga is worn as a way to express words without saying anything.

“Sometimes, if you don’t want to shout or scream at somebody, all you do is take the kanga, wear it, and they’ll be reading what is on the kanga,” Kiche said.

In addition to the colorful textiles displayed on the walls, the exhibit includes a video where Kiche demonstrated how to wear the garment to best display the message. Various members of the African community in Iowa also spoke in the video on what the textiles in the exhibit meant to them.

Osman is a member of the Sudanese community in Iowa City and highlighted a 2018 work featured in the exhibit by Sudanese artist Taissir Abdelgadir. Osman said Abdelgadir used real cotton textile from Sudan, the only textile of its kind to be included in the exhibit.

The Sudanese community has been in Iowa City since 1995, Osman said. She was grateful for the opportunity to share and reflect on the African cultures in Iowa through this exhibit.

“It [has] been a long time since all these people moved here, and they are working, they are studying, they are celebrating, and they are wearing their beautiful clothes,” Osman said. “And we all have to share it.”

While the central theme was communication, the exhibit itself was divided into three sub-themes: performance, style, and gender. The curators were invited by Gundlach to view each fabric and decide its placement in the museum, according to its corresponding topic.

Gundlach said many of the textiles came from the Stanley’s archives, and others were on loan and acquired by the museum. A few of the works came from Elizabeth “Betty” Stanley’s collection, from whom the museum got its name.

“She was really fundamental in developing the museum’s African textile collection. She didn’t give the museum its first African textiles, but she did give a number of them to the museum as part of a gift,” Gundlach said. “The Stanley Collection of African art is known around the world as one of the finest and most important in terms of cultural significance and artistic quality.”

The exhibit also contains four textiles from the Roy and Sophie Sieber collection. Roy Sieber was the first person to receive a Ph.D. in African art history, which he received at the University of Iowa in 1957, Gundlach said.

“It’s important to include work from this collection to speak to the institutional history of African art studies in Iowa, so it’s a very special opportunity to have examples from that collection here,” he said.

One of Gundlach’s favorite pieces was a Djerban-style silk textile from Tunisia from the late 19th century, categorized under the sub-theme of performance. It consisted of over 100 hand-woven multicolored strips of silk sewn together, and was accompanied by a contributed portrait of a woman wearing it.

“I’m hoping that by people going through the Stanley Museum, seeing the beautiful artwork that’s there through this fabric, they’ll know what we are all about,” Kiche said. “They’ll look at the beautiful fabric and not look down upon it or call it a costume, but look at it, because they’re the kind of clothes that we wear and it represents the country where we come from.”