Museum Tekstil Jakarta: Indonesia’s Textile Heritage

                                                                                                                 
An oasis of beauty and tranquility in the bustling Tanah Abang district of Jakarta, the Museum Tekstil Jakarta offers visitors a captivating window into the world of traditional Indonesian textiles. The Museum’s main building, a graceful early-19^th-century structure with Tuscan columns and fluted pilasters, was once used as headquarters of the Pioneer Youth Front and the Civil Defense Force in the struggle to defend Indonesia's newly proclaimed independence. Today this national monument houses display rooms where rotating exhibitions showcase textiles from the museum’s own collection or those of private collectors. The museum also periodically exhibits the work of national and international textile artists.                                                           

In 1976, at a time when Indonesia’s textile traditions were in decline, leading Indonesians banded together under the leadership of then Governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, in order to conserve Indonesia’s textile tradition and encourage public appreciation of this vital part of Indonesia’s cultural heritage. The collection, which comprises some 2800 valuable and rare textiles from all over Indonesia, got its start when members of Himpunan Wastraprema (Society of Textile Lovers) donated 500 high-value textiles from their private collections.

Next to the Muesum Tekstil’s main building is the Batik Gallery, which was opened on October 2, 2010, exactly one year after UNESCO recognized Indonesian batik as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In the Batik Gallery, visitors can admire classic and contemporary batiks belonging to Yayasan Batik Indonesia and its members. Each room focuses on a particular area of batik production in Indonesia.

At the rear of the Museum grounds is the Batik Pavilion, a wooden building constructed in the architectural style typical of old Jakarta. Here researchers or visitors can draw their own designs or copy from the museum’s collection of patterns to produce their own batik cloth. Visitors can also learn about natural dyes in the adjacent natural dye garden where many of the plants used to produce natural colors for Indonesian textiles can be found.

Other buildings on the grounds house a library with an excellent collection of books on traditional Indonesian textiles, the Wastra Room with a collection of looms and other weaving tools from across the archipelago, a gift shop, administrative offices, and conservation and storage facilities, including a laboratory, where the collection is researched, documented, conserved and stored.

                               Museum Tekstil Jakarta

                               Jl. Aipda K.S. Tubun No. 2-4

                               Jakarta Barat

                               Open: Tuesday to Sunday; 9:00 am to 3:00 pm.

This article was originally published in NOW!Jakarta under http://old.nowjakarta.co.id/museum-tekstil-jakarta-window-indonesias-textile-heritage/                                  text by Marianne Scholte