Member's Talk by Cheri Hunter:
'First, please, you must have some tea': A Collector’s Adventures into Central Asian Textiles.
Enter the world of embroidered suzanis, tie-dyed ikats, costumes, carpets and trappings, and decorative artifacts of Central Asia with Cheri Hunter. Born with the 'collector gene', Cheri has built several collections of handwoven and hand-created textiles during her lifetime of travel. In this Zoom talk, Cheri will reveal how she first encountered Central Asian textiles, who informed her knowledge and influenced her taste, and will share highlight pieces from her collection. She’ll recount the pursuits of hunting them down, from both renowned and obscure dealers in great bazaars to secret “holes-in-the-wall,” including on-line sources, and the exciting process of negotiating and buying, which can be applied to all collectors. She will include photographs of a recent “collections” show of a number of her ikat chapans (coats) and kurtas (tunics,) presented on live models at the Bowers Museum of Cultural History in Santa Ana.
Cheri Hunter is a graduate of UCLA in Art and Cinema, and was a career film editor in Hollywood for nearly thirty years. She began purchasing manufactured fabrics in high school for sewing her own clothes, and started learning about and collecting oriental carpets and ethnographic textiles in her twenties, as she traveled through 47 countries on five continents. Cheri is a founding member of TMA/SC (Textile Museum Associates of Southern California, Inc.,) Programs Co-Chair and Chairman since 1992, and current President. TMA/SC is a non-profit study group of about 175 members which presents monthly programs on handmade textiles, ethnographic weavings and dress, Oriental carpets, and fiber art from around the world, mostly from non-Western cultures. Cheri has also been an avid still photographer since her teens, and since then has focused mostly on adventure travel photography, while at the same time experiencing the local textile culture, and has written many articles with photospreads for HALI magazine, the quarterly international journal of textile arts.