May 17 Petra Lecture to Feature World-Renowned Collector

May 11, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Calvin College will host Widad Kawar, owner of the world's largest and most
comprehensive collection of Syro-Palestinian textiles, jewelry and household
items, on May 17 as part of the Tuesday-evening lecture series accompanying the
Petra: Lost City of Stone exhibition at the college.

Sally de Vries, organizer of the series, says Kawar's talk is a coup for the
college.

"Every museum that has a collection of this kind has learned from Widad," she
says. "She's a loving, Christian Palestinian woman who is expressing and
preserving her heritage."

Kawar's lecture, "Cultural Treasures of Jordan: Traditional Expression," will
take place at 7 p.m. in the Board Room of the Prince Conference Center at
Calvin.

Kawar, educated at the Women's College of Beirut, grew up familiar with the
richly embroidered traditional dresses of Bethlehem, where she spent her youth.

Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Kawar began collecting Arab clothing, jewelry
and household items from the area formerly known as Palestine - the area today
encompassing Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria - as a means of preserving a way
of life that was vanishing.

"Without her knowledge, enthusiasm and willingness to share, much of what was
now known would be lost to mankind," de Vries once wrote of her friend.

Kawar collected not only the clothing and accoutrements from Hebron, Ramallah,
Jaffa, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Beersheba, the Transjordan, and other Middle
Eastern areas, but also the life stories that went with them. In fact she
learned many of these stories in Palestinian refugee camps.

Though self-trained, she has brought a scholarly rigor to her collecting,
patiently learning the embroidery techniques of various regions and the
meanings embedded in various pieces of Arab dress.

And Kawar has inspired other collections and other collectors - notably de
Vries, who, beginning in 1968 under her friend's tutelage, has assembled a
large, carefully researched Arab heritage collection of her own.

"She helped me to buy the most representative, finest pieces," de Vries says.
"She wanted me to have a collection that accurately represented her Palestinian
heritage."

The de Vries collection is an accurate enough representation that a fraction
of it serves as an exhibition of Jordanian cultural heritage and the
introduction to Calvin's edition of Petra: Lost City of Stone. Three pieces
from that exhibition, including a silk Ma'an dress, came from Kawar's
collection.

Beginning in 1999, de Vries has helped Kawar to preserve and document her
collection, which has been exhibited in Japan, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden
Norway, England, Iceland, Switzerland and Jordan. The pair's efforts, which
included cataloguing each item (including Kawar's rare books) recording them in
a database, and creating a collection Web site, www.arabheritage.org, have
turned the Kawar collection into a research center of Palestinian culture.
 
And something more, de Vries adds.

"It's the human dimension," she says, "of an area of the world that throughout
history has always been important."

To schedule an interview with Kawar call Sally de Vries at 293-6721

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Received on Wed May 11 10:04:26 2005