Cultures united in waves of grain

FEW materials could be further from most Angelenos’ lives than straw -- those yellowy, dried grain stalks associated with farms, barns and livestock. So it’s a bit surprising that an exhibition of straw art has become a draw at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, even overshadowing a concurrent retrospective of famed local ceramist Beatrice Wood.

With its intricately woven masks and outfits fashioned from shaggy stalks of wheat, rice and other grains, “Feast of Straw: Harvest of Hope” is an exploration of ancient harvest ceremonies through costume. The show also exemplifies the power of some exhibitions to cultivate interest in a subject visitors might not even know they would find interesting.

“This is really a rare glimpse into another world for most Angelenos. That’s why I think they’re responding to it,” said executive director Maryna Hrushetska, who characterized the exhibition as the museum’s “surprise summer hit.”

“Is it going to be a good harvest? Are we going to survive? Those themes have parallels in the human experience,” she added. “Today, we don’t feel that because we go to Whole Foods and there’s always ripe apples and tomatoes.”

The abundance or scarcity of a harvest affects everyone worldwide, but it’s a culture’s proximity to the act that determines harvesting’s significance in daily life and its ritualization. In urbanized areas, the culture is less connected to food cultivation and is therefore predominantly devoid of harvest ceremony. But in regions such as Africa and many parts of Japan and Europe, the tradition remains strong. It is those cultures that are best represented in the exhibition.

“Every culture is different around the world,” said Morgyn Owens-Celli, exhibition curator and director of the American Museum of Straw Art in Long Beach. “The one thing that cuts through all of it is this culture of the harvest.”

ENTERING the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s third floor, visitors are greeted with the faint smell of straw and a broom-like Whittlesea “bear,” which, in rural England, is worn to symbolically vanquish winter and usher in the spring. For “Feast of Straw,” the bear also symbolizes the beginning of a year’s worth of rituals, which are laid out in the show chronologically and by type as they jump from culture to culture.

“The process of harvest is more than one period of cutting it down,” said Owens-Celli, who is doing research for a book on straw costumes. “There’s custom to the whole length of it.... Food and its growing is in everyday life.”

In the show, spring rituals move from Slovakia to Germany to Africa, among other places, in the forms of a tidy skirt and cap, hefty jacket and pants, and a masked, caped warrior. For summer, when wheat and rye are harvested, there are Polish and Belarussian harvest crowns fashioned from straw braids and ornate woven flowers. In the fall, there is Ireland’s Jack Straw, in a suit and straw veil. The end of the harvest cycle -- winter -- is represented by Scotland’s skeklers (or boogeymen), which are used to scare away evil spirits.

A handful of Japanese harvest costumes and a series of meticulously crafted masks round out the exhibition, which ends with a “touch zone” for visitors to feel the different varieties of straw they’ve just seen.

That these costumes, crowns and masks are available for viewing is unusual. The straw art used in harvest ceremonies typically is burned at the end of the ritual. Owens-Celli negotiated with practitioners to save some of the costumes; others were specifically constructed for the exhibition.

Shipping straw from foreign countries also resulted in U.S. customs battles. Some of the items in “Feast of Straw” were quarantined because they contained remnant grains, which, though fumigated before shipping, were perceived by the U.S. government as a potential agricultural danger. Owens-Celli had to hire customs brokers to gain their release. Almost all of the items in “Feast of Straw” will have a permanent home at the Museum of Straw Art in Long Beach when it is slated to reopen in 2006. The museum was open for a year in the mid-’90s before it burned down in a firebombing directed at a religious group in the same building.

Though the fire destroyed the museum’s collection of Asian embroidery and a lot of its Russian and Belarussian dolls, the accident has had an upside. In the 10 years the museum has been closed, Owens-Celli has been able to channel the operating budget into acquisitions, increasing the collection tenfold. When it reopens, most likely in the Long Beach arts district, thousands of items will be on display, dating from the 1600s to the present and representing 60 cultures, Owens-Celli said. And that still doesn’t capture all of it.

“Every seven years, the culture of straw dies someplace in the world before we can really grab hold of it and study it, and that’s something that always gives me a sense of urgency. It’s so amazing that such a simple material expresses life so vividly,” Owens-Celli said.

“We want people to realize this is not a glimpse of something antique,” he added, “but relevant to [our] time.”

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‘Feast of Straw’

Harvest of Hope

Where: Craft and Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Curator Morgyn Owens-Celli will give a lecture called “Inside the Feast of Straw” at 2 p.m. Sept. 10.

Ends: Sept. 25

Price: $5; $3, students and seniors; free, children 12 and younger

Info: (323) 937-7803; www.cafam.org