Textile

16356A

Thanks to keen eyes and a historic photograph, we were able to reattribute a piece of tapa cloth to the Leland Stanford Jr. Collection. We are currently working our way through ethnographic collections from the Pacific world. Before his death, Leland Stanford Jr. purchased clubs, spears, and other items made by Pacific Islander peoples. His acquisitions included pieces of tapa, a bark–fiber cloth still used throughout the Pacific. This 1880s photograph shows the display Leland Jr. arranged in the family's San Francisco mansion. At left, a large tapa cloth with dark geometric designs serves as a curtain, while a distinctive piece with triangular fringe and finely drawn gridded designs hangs in the center of the arrangement. We rediscovered this pieces during inventory and, with the photograph in hand, matched its distinctive form and complex design to the one in Leland Jr.'s museum! This associated was not in any museum records but helps us better understand our founding collections. Decorative techniques distinguish tapa between islands. The deliberate, dark geometric hatching and rectangular field on this piece is characteristic of designs used by makers from the Solomon Islands.

Bark/Vegetable Pigment

Oceania; Eastern Melanesia; Fiji

unknown

Leland Stanford, Jr. Collection. Collected by Leland (DeWitt) Stanford Jr. prior to 1884. Donated to Stanford University by Jane Lathrop Stanford as part of the founding museum collections.

Anthropology; Oceania