A new exhibit featuring story quilts and cloth whose origins stem from Southeast Asia is now being featured at the Sioux City Public Museum.
Director Steve Hansen says the Hmong flower cloth is one of the world’s great textile traditions, with the quilts telling a story about the people who made them:
OC….cloth is community. :16
The quilts were not widely known outside Asia until after the Vietnam War, when Hmong refugees arrive in the United States.
Hansen says some of the works also reveal the radical upheaval Hmong refugees experienced during that era, as many crossed the Mekong River to Thailand, sharing escape narratives of those in refugee camps:
OC………happy stories. ;20
The exhibition features 28 textiles-flower cloths and embroidered story quilts by those in the Hmong community.
The traveling national exhibit will be on display through March 5th and is free to the public at the museum located at 4th and Nebraska Streets.
