War & Tapestry: Global Narrative Opportunity in Textiles

Jakkai Siributr at Whitworth art Gallery Manchester, November 2024 (Photo Antonio Parente)

By KENDALL KRANTZ January 14, 2025 

Jakkai Siributr’s “IDP Story Cloth” is four large-scale, hand-embroidered panels in the colorful Hmong style. They tell the story of Myanmar’s ethnic minority groups who fled through Thailand during a time of conflict. 

Conflict and tapestry hold a strange connection. Periods of conflict can renew focus on textile art as during and after wars, traditional art materials can become scarce. Textiles, often readily available or repurposed from everyday items, are practical alternatives for creative expression.  

History is woven with innovative tapestry artists, many touched by conflict. In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) produced its first textile show: Anni Albers Textiles. Modernist movements, such as the Bauhaus, emphasized the integration of art, craft, and industry. Albers herself famously led textile workshops in the Bauhaus tradition, both during the interwar Weimar Republic and after reaching the USA as a refugee. French-Ukrainian Sonia Delaunay was creating “wearable abstractions” among her mixed-medium works by 1913 and began working in tapestries after moving to Portugal because of WWI. She later joined the French Resistance in WWII. Delaunay was precluded by artists ranging from enslaved quiltmaker Harriet Powers, who designed richly narrative quilts, to the unnumbered, unnamed tapestry-makers of earlier history, such as the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Norman Conquest of England. 

Textiles, more broadly, are certainly having a moment in the fine arts world. Through 2024-2025, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction is reflecting this fixation, appearing first at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), then the National Gallery of Art, then the National Gallery of Canada, and finally, the MoMA. Woven History’s mixture of textile forms necessitates a focus on production and labor, though showcasing how “weaving and textiles are the quintessential link between lived experience and art.” However, the focus on maker identity in Woven History’s survey of fiber arts is only the start to meaning-making in tapestry contexts. 

“The themes of my work that I have so far explored usually stemmed from my own ignorance and curiosity and prompted me to ask why things are the way they are. I then force myself to dive into extensive research to gain better understanding of each subject. My work addresses the plights of different marginalized communities and the unofficial history that is constantly being rewritten or permanently erased,” Siributr explains. 

IDP Story Cloth (Set of 4), 2016

Siributr is a global authority on contemporary tapestry. He studied Textile and Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA; and Printed Textile Design, at Philadelphia University, USA. His work is permanently in the public collections of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, USA, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, and many more. Tapestry is a global language, and as a medium with more immediate narrative potential than fiber abstraction, tapestry work can approach de-marginalization in novel ways which don’t require a preconceived understanding of the maker’s context. 

In England, the Barbican showed Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, focusing on reclamation of power. Many of the wall-hanging textiles, again, focus on stories of conflict: T. Vinoja presented handstitched aerial landscapes derived from testimonies from the Sri Lankan Civil War, Teresa Margolles reflects on brutal murders with two tapestries, and Harmony Hammond’s “Bandaged Grid #9” presses makeshift bloody bandages to reclaimed canvas. 

In Boston, Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories, approaches the character of quilts as a storytelling device. In South Korea, the 15th Gwangju Biennale’s Thailand Pavilion presented The Composition of Unknown Melodies, which showcased the “IDP Story Cloth” panels. 

The Composition of Unknown Melodies, to me, represents a clear-eyed understanding of tapestry’s potential as a narrative medium. By preserving a narrative, as the embroidered panels do in depicting village life and emigration, and a culture style, in the bright, sketch-like figures, precious fiber resources double as an art object. 

In Siributr’s ongoing show at The Whitworth, There’s no Place (up until March 16th, 2025), he uses this particular moment’s focus on textile work as an expression of identity with the broader historical connection between tapestry and war: “The colorful textile embroidery of There’s no Place were created by groups of stateless Shan ethnic minority youths in Thailand. They were asked to share their life stories, hopes and dreams through embroidery. Being stateless, these undocumented communities are faced with restrictions on a daily basis and so for these workshops, I wanted them to experience total freedom by being able to choose the colors of embroidery threads whereas the public who participate in the response workshop are only allowed to use black, grey and white threads to experience some restrictions.”

Tapestry is a reckoning, embroidery a reminder that threads are both fragile and unyielding. They bind us to stories we must carry forward—stories of loss, resilience, and the possibility of freedom, one stitch at a time.

In this current revival of textile art’s cultural foregrounding, the medium transcends its categorization as “craft,” emerging as a potent site of resistance, identity, and memory. The approach Siributr has developed over 25 years of working with textiles—to center marginalized voices, highlighting their agency even in the face of statelessness—amplifies tapestry’s narrative power. 

Jakkai Siributr’s “IDP Story Cloth” underscores a vital truth: tapestries are not merely materials; they are witnesses. Across cultures and centuries, from Harriet Powers’ quilts to Anni Albers’ modernist weaves, and from the Bayeux Tapestry to contemporary works reflecting ongoing struggles, fiber art has carried the weight of human stories through war, displacement, and survival. 

Your next opportunity to see “IDP Story Cloth” will be January 9th through February 8th at Flowers Gallery in London. WM