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ethnographic arts Colors of the Oasis I YOUNG ADULT ROBE, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, 121.9 x 129.5 centimeters, 1870s. Photograhs courtesy of The Textile Museum. Robin Updike t is easy to wander blissfully through the displays of brilliantly colored and patterned textiles in Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats and see ways in which these nineteenth-century Asian textiles look contemporary. With their bold designs in jewel tones of magenta, emerald, cobalt blue, sunflower, and other dazzling colors, the textiles are as graphic as any twenty-first-century poster or consumer packaging. The ikats predate Henri Matisse's vibrant, convention-defying collage work by a century. And though the fashionistas of the late 1960s thought they were revolutionizing clothing with op art color combinations and arresting patterning, Colors of the Oasis demonstrates that the weavers of Central Asia were masters of exuberant color and pattern centuries before avant- garde Westerners broke out of their monochromatic palettes. Colors of the Oasis, organized by the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., and recently exhibited at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, is drawn primarily from the museum's Megalli Collection of Central Asian textiles. And though it is tempting to look for connections between this exquisite, nineteenth-century ikat artistry and today's world, the exhibition stands on its own, magnificently, as a celebration of a sophisticated, highly developed craft that reached its pinnacle in nineteenth-century Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan. The craft was developed and honed in the relatively tolerant, diverse culture of Central Asia. Bukhara was an important post on the Silk Road starting in the Roman era. By the seventh century Central Asian weavers were using locally cultivated silk to make ikat. ROBE, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, 138.4 x 213.7 centimeters, late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The word ikat is derived from a Malay term meaning to tie or bind, and rigorously binding long silk threads, then dipping them into a series of dyes, is the essence of making ikat textiles. Unlike printed textiles, which are generally woven in a single color then printed in some manner afterwards, ikat is meticulously designed, literally thread by thread, before the threads are strung into the loom. The pattern designer plans the design, then dye experts bind and dye the threads multiple times to produce threads with the correctly sequenced patterns. Finally the dyed threads are strung as warps onto a loom, where weavers complete the textile by weaving the threads into lengths of patterned fabric. In Central Asian ikats, the warps—which are the long strands that extend from the weaver to the end of the piece of fabric—are made of dyed silk. The wefts, which are the threads that are strung across the width of the loom, are undyed and made of cotton or silk. Part of the skill of the Central Asian weavers was to make the wefts invisible. Look as closely as you can, but it is impossible to see the undyed weft threads in these textiles. DRESS, Central Asia, 121.3 x 170.8 centimeters, early twentieth century. Walking through this exhibition is a feast for the eyes. Most of the sixty or so pieces on display are robes for men or women, with a few smaller ones cut for children. The robes were made in 16 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012