Royal Ontario Museum Acquires Landmark Collection of Arab Textiles

A Collection Spanning Fourteen Nations

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto has acquired nearly 600 handcrafted Arab textiles and cultural objects, dramatically expanding its holdings and positioning the institution among the foremost repositories of such material anywhere in the world.

The Widad Kawar Collection of Arab Dress and Heritage Arts encompasses garments, historic pieces and everyday accessories sourced from Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. The acquisition was made possible through the Louise Hawley Stone Charitable Trust, supplemented by a partial gift from Amin Kawar and the estate of Kamel Kawar.

A Lifetime of Preservation

Widad Kamel Kawar is a textile historian based in Amman, Jordan, born to a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Bethlehem and Ramallah. Over decades she has devoted herself to collecting, studying and exhibiting objects from across the Arab world, with particular emphasis on women's embroidered clothing, jewellery and items of daily use. In 2014 she established Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, a small museum on the grounds of her family residence in Amman, to make the collections more widely accessible.

Her practice has extended beyond acquisition to include meeting individual artisans and recording their personal narratives. This dimension gives the collection exceptional scholarly value, according to Fahmida Suleman, the ROM's senior curator of Islamic world collections and a specialist in art from the region and its diaspora.

At a time when regional conflicts are destroying tangible and intangible heritage, especially traditions of handmade and hand-crafted objects often passed down from generation to generation, Suleman notes that Kawar's archive is all the more vital.

A Personal Connection to Toronto

Kawar herself expressed confidence in the institution. She recalled visiting the ROM years ago to view its Palestinian dresses dating from the 1850s, the oldest collection of its kind, and witnessing how carefully they had been stored, conserved and exhibited. She stated that she is confident the museum will care for her collection with the same rigour and share it broadly with its audiences.

Canada is home to people from across the Arab world, and Kawar expressed hope that communities will find joy and inspiration in their own cultural heritage at the ROM.

Suleman, who spent a decade as a curator at the British Museum before joining the ROM, says Kawar reached out to her as she was departing for Toronto, selecting the institution as the ideal partner for a curated capsule of 586 objects and textiles.

Widad knows that Toronto is home to many second-generation Arab Canadians who have never had a chance to connect with their homelands and wanted them to be able to access this collection, Suleman explains.

First Display and Future Plans

From 16 June, a bridal dress and accessories acquired by Kawar from a Bethlehem collection dating between 1910 and 1930 will be on public view for at least six months. The richly embroidered bridal dress and jacket are displayed in the museum's ground-floor Currelly Gallery alongside related objects including a coin-embellished headdress, ornate silver jewellery and an elegant veil with handmade lace.

This installation previews a larger exhibition planned for the coming years, which will feature modern-day fashions and contemporary art from the Arab world drawing on traditional dress patterns and embroidery motifs.

The gallery's namesake, Charles T. Currelly (1876–1957), the ROM's founding director, visited Palestine in 1910 and acquired a significant collection of textiles and dresses from his friend, the pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt.

Suleman emphasises that the Kawar collection stands apart from the ROM's existing holdings because it was assembled by a Palestinian woman who documented the histories of the objects' creators. In doing so, Kawar has moved beyond the orientalist framework that characterised much collecting in the region, restoring agency to the artists and telling the stories of women and their culture through documentation of marriages, births, deaths and identity.