Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

In much of Polynesia, women have created and adorned barkcloth for use as clothing—including wrappers and shawls. Called siapo in Samoa and generally referred to as tapa across Polynesia, people have also widely used barkcloth beyond attire as bed and floor coverings, room dividers, offerings, and in formal gift exchanges. This mid-twentieth-century siapo cloth is designed in a square grid pattern with repeating geometric forms inside each square grid, with some of the siapo cloth patterns attributed to names. Barkcloth has been widely produced in Polynesia from the bark of a tree, with some designs associated with specific island groups and some techniques shared across Polynesian islands or reflecting interactions between different Polynesian cultures and places.