DOWRY

1999 100 pages. 60 color photographs by Lynton Gardiner, Philipp & Rittermann and Helene Baine Cincebeaux. 5 black and white archival photographs. Selected bibliography. Commentaries by Joyce Corbett, Exhibition Guest Curator, and Helene Baine Cincebeaux, collector and author, Design and Foreword by Martha Longenecker, Director. ISBN No. 0-914155-11-3.

From our previous exhibition, DOWRY — Eastern European Painted Furniture, Textiles and Related Folk Art. Guest-curated by Joyce Corbett. The exhibition highlighted the exquisite artistry of painted wooden furniture and textiles created in preparation for marriage. It includes Hungarian painted furniture from the Bill and Margaret Pearson Collection and textiles and dress from the Helene Baine Cincebeaux and Helen Zemek Baine Collection.

Excerpt from the publication

THE ART OF DOWRY

Foreward by Martha W. Longenecker
Director

Embroidering textiles for dowry and embellishing the home and its furnishings has long been a woman's art in Central and Eastern Europe. This heritage has been passed generation to generation from mother to daughter in preparation for marriage and raising a family. Through the expressive work of her hands a young woman and potential bride reveals her character in a silent language of art.

This is a living tradition of doing and making all things in the most beautiful and reverent way! It is a practical and frugal art of transforming common materials into extraordinary personal and domestic adornment.

It is the intent of this book to provide a glimpse into the distinctive beauty of Czech and Slovak textiles and Hungarian painted wood furnishings related to the art of the dowry and to recognize the women of these cultures who embellished all life in harmony with their environment. Their designs relate to the natural beauty and abundant floral and animal life of such regions as the Hungarian Great Plain surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains. Here village people were able to live austere lives with few possessions, but they could not and did not live without beauty!

Rich and creative is the blend of their cultures which have evolved over thousands of years at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. Vast, complex and deep in meaning are the design influences of the many cultures, including the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian Empires, that have occupied this region prior to the land's being divided into separate republics.

Related readings listed on page one hundred may provide the reader with a deeper understanding of this history and insight into the origins and meaning of the variety of design motifs encompassing this art.

DOWRY was initiated as an exhibition theme ten years ago by Billy Pearson, the renowned jockey and long-time Mingei International enthusiast. During the seven-year period he and his family were living in Europe, he passionately appreciated, selected and collected the finest pieces of Hungarian painted wood furniture which he has generously lent to this major exhibition - the first of its kind in the United States. He had previously lent his superb collection of American quilts and weather vanes for a 1980 exhibition and, more recently, additional selections of folk art to AMERICAN EXPRESSIONS OF LIBERTY, the 1996 inaugural exhibition of Mingei International's new museum facility in,Balboa Park, San Diego.

Through the fortuitous arrangement of the exhibition guest curator, Joyce Corbett, the Hungarian painted furniture was complemented by selections from The Baine / Cincebeaux Collection. Consisting of over three thousand pieces of folk art and folk dress from Slovakia, Moravia and Bohemia, it was gathered over the past thirty years by Helen Zemek Baine and her daughter, Helene Baine Cincebeaux.

The exhibition was further enriched by the generous loan from Evelyn Domjan of three tapestries designed by her late husband, Joseph Domjan, an internationally recognized Hungarian artist. They are superb examples of contemporary art incorporating traditional dowry design motifs.

DOWRY is an important link in Mingei International's series of exhibitions which provide the opportunity of seeing the best of art from all cultures of the world - the seeing of which awakens new expressions of innate creativity.