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Newsletter, February 2014
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Welcome to the Year of the Horse, 2014 and soon-to-be 2557! TAEC hit a number of milestones last year, with your help! Read below for some highlights, including over $67,000 earned by rural handicraft producers and our Hmong ethnic youth intern. We also have big plans for this year, including our first community-curated exhibit opening in September!
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Community-Curated Exhibit to Open in September 2014
This September we will be saying goodbye to our Katu exhibit as it prepares to move to its permanent home in the Xekong Provincial Museum. Our next temporary exhibition will break from our mold of employing TAEC staff, advisors, and other museum professionals as researchers and curators. Instead, the Stitching Our Stories Community Researchers we’ve been working with over the past two years will take the lead in documenting women as culture bearers, child-rearers, and healers within their communities.
We’re excited to continue our relationship with these women and hope that having their work displayed so prominently in our museum will inspire other Lao youth to explore their own cultural traditions and embolden young women to sound their voices.
We need your help to bring this exhibition to life! This exhibit will incorporate video, photography, and objects, and we are looking for donations of iPads to be used as interactive displays. If you or your company can support us, please e-mail information@taeclaos.org.
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| Photograph of women at work in the field taken by Ma, a Hmong woman who sells handicrafts at the night market. |
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Local children and museum guests looking at the photography in the 2013 Stitching Our Stories community exhibition and celebration. |
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In December, the Stitching Our Stories film premiered at the Luang Prabang Film Festival with a special event attended by the filmmakers, their inspiring subjects, and our partner, PhotoForward. The response was wonderful! One woman even told us it was the highlight of the festival. Now, the film has been picked up by the Angkor Wat International Film Festival, Durham Women Rising Film Festival, and as a part of the UN Commission on the Status of Women event in New York City. You can now watch the full-length film, as well as the four shorts, on the Stitching Our Stories YouTube Channel. Let us know what you think!
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| Two of the filmmakers and their subjects at their Luang Prabang Film Festival presentation. Photo courtesy of PhotoForward. |
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Filmmakers with their subjects during the interviews. |
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TAEC Accepted to Santa Fe International Folk Art Market
Know any textile enthusiasts or Lao culture lovers in the American southwest or California? For the third summer in a row, TAEC has been accepted to the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. This year, we’d love to make connections with craft shops, museums, and cultural organisations while we’re across the Pacific. If you know of a place or an audience for a talk or a trunk show, please contact us. If you’d like to help us out at the Market itself, do let us know!
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| Customers visiting TAEC's booth at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. |
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2013 was a great year for TAEC! In addition to opening the new exhibition, “Carving a Community: the Katu People” we:
- enabled $67,073 in earnings for our handicraft producers,
- were featured in 2 exhibits overseas: Empowering Women at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle and Between History and New Horizons at the Asia Society Texas Center,
- held our first summer children’s activity benefitting 19 kids, including several from outside of Luang Prabang town,
- hosted Pasong Lee as part of our ethnic youth internship programme with PhotoForward,
- redesigned our Museum Shop and launched a new online store thanks to volunteer Lauren Lancy (thank you!),
- welcomed 20,550 visitors to our centre to learn more about the ethnic and artisanal heritage of Laos,
- co-organised a panel and spoke at the Lao Studies Conference.
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| TAEC photographs exhibited in the Asia Society Texas Center. |
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Youth playing a game about different ethnic groups at our summer kid's activity. |
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