In this talk, Arielle Winnik, Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, discusses the recent exhibition, Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textiles, which was held at the Art Gallery from September 12, 2025, to January 11, 2026. The exhibition featured over 100 textiles from the 14th century to the 20th century from across the Indonesian archipelago including examples of diverse techniques, such as batik, ikat, block printing and supplementary weft. The talk introduces the material in the exhibition and the larger collection of Indonesian textiles at the Yale University Art Gallery and discusses how the curators approached turning the over 1200 Indonesian textiles in the Gallery’s collection into an exhibition aimed at textile specialists and those new to field alike.

Arielle Winnik is the Donna Torrance Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. Her scholarship focuses on premodern textiles and dress of the Indian Ocean region. She has a particular interest in the movement of these highly portable objects between communities of different cultural and confessional identities across interregional networks. At Yale, her department holds over 25,000 objects from maritime Southeast Asia. She works particularly closely on the department’s collection of Indonesian and Indian trade textiles from the medieval and early modern periods and gold objects from Hindu-Buddhist Java. Arielle holds a PhD in the history of art from Bryn Mawr College, an MA in art history and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and a BA in ancient studies from Barnard College, Columbia University. She worked on the exhibition, Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textiles, with Ruth Barnes at the Yale University Art Gallery.