Ruth Barnes

Ruth Barnes received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, based on her research in eastern Indonesia. She also has an M.A. in Art History from the university of Edinburgh. Her dissertation was published as The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera. A Study of an Eastern Indonesian Weaving Tradition (Leiden, E.J. Brill 1989). She has written extensively on Indonesian weaving and related art forms. 

 

From 1990 to the end of 2009 she was textile curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she focussed on early Indian Ocean trade networks. She published Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt. The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997) and co-authored (with Rosemary Crill and Steven Cohen) Trade, Temple and Court. Indian Textiles from the Tapi Collection (2002). Together with Mary Kahlenberg she co-edited Five Hundred Years of Indonesian Textiles. In January 2010 she left the Ashmolean and moved to Yale, where she now is the Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. She is currently working on a comprehensive catalogue of the department’s collection of Indonesian textiles, to be published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery in 2025.