Alexandria museum exhibit covers "The Global Language of Headwear"
The Alexandria Museum of Art, 933 2nd St., is hosting “The Global Language of Headwear: Cultural Identity, Rites of Passage, and Spirituality” through Feb. 17.
“It included 80-something hats and headwear from over 30 cultures divided into different categories like power, spirituality,” said AMoA executive and curator Catherine Pears M. Pears. “And what we discover is that no matter what the cultures are, people use hats, symbolically for some of the same reasons.”
The exhibit is divided into five categories and highlights cultural identity, power, prestige and status, ceremonies and celebrations, spiritual beliefs, and protection.
Over 43 countries and five continents are represented in the exhibit that shows how varied cultures across the world can be, they are united by common themes that hat and headwear personify.
Brandon Lewis, LSU Museum of Art Educator and Public Programs Manager, presented a free program about hats and their impact and significance in Black culture last Friday before a performance of “Crowns.”
For every exhibition, a performing arts series related to the theme is presented, said Pears. The musical play “Crowns” was performed Friday and Saturday with some local actors and directed by Rosa Metoyer.
AMoA board member Ingrid Johnson, Esq., hosted a Big Hat luncheon prior to Saturday’s performance.
A synopsis of the play on the website broadwaylicensing.com states that the play is about a young Black woman from Brooklyn who moved down South to live with her aunt after her brother is killed.
The synopsis goes to to say that she sees hats everywhere “in exquisite variety, and the characters use the hats to tell tales concerning everything from the etiquette of hats to their historical and contemporary social function."
She finds out there's a hat for "for every occasion, from flirting to churchgoing to funerals to baptisms, and the tradition of hats is traced back to African rituals and slavery and forward to the New Testament and current fashion."
The concludes with the young woman "whose cultural identity as a young Black Brooklyn woman has been so at odds with the more traditional and older Southern Blacks, embrace hats and their cultural significance as a part of her own fiercely independent identity.”
To learn more about this exhibit and others at the Alexandria Museum of Art, visit themuseum.org
This article originally appeared on Alexandria Town Talk: Alexandria museum exhibit covers "The Global Language of Headwear"
