Royal Ontario Museum Acquires Widad Kawar Collection of Arab Dress
The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has added a major body of Arab dress and heritage arts to its holdings, securing nearly 600 textiles, garments, and related cultural objects assembled by Widad Kamel Kawar, the Amman-based textile historian who founded Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress in 2014. The acquisition, supported by the Louise Hawley Stone Charitable Trust and a partial gift from Amin Kawar and the estate of Kamel Kawar, gives the museum a collection that spans multiple countries and generations of craft.
From the larger group, the ROM selected a capsule of 586 objects and textiles. The first public glimpse comes June 16, when a bridal dress and accessories from Bethlehem, dating from 1910 to 1930, go on display for nine months in the museum’s ground-floor Currelly Gallery. The installation includes the embroidered bridal dress and jacket, along with a headdress set with coins, ornate silver jewelry, and a veil edged with handmade lace.
For Fahmida Suleman, the ROM’s senior curator of Islamic world collections, the collection’s importance lies not only in its scale but in the way it was assembled. Kawar met with individual artisans and recorded their stories, preserving the human histories behind the objects. Suleman said that approach gives the collection unusual weight at a moment when regional conflicts are erasing both tangible and intangible heritage, especially handmade traditions passed from one generation to the next.
Kawar has also said she hopes the ROM will care for the collection with the same attention she has given it, and that communities in Canada will find a point of connection in it. Toronto, Suleman noted, is home to many second-generation Arab Canadians who have had limited access to the material culture of their families’ homelands.
The ROM’s decision also places the collection in dialogue with the institution’s own history. Charles T. Currelly, the museum’s founding director, gathered textiles and dresses in Palestine in 1910, building a collection shaped by the collecting practices of his era. By contrast, Suleman said, Kawar’s work restores agency to the makers and centers women’s lives through documentation of marriages, births, deaths, and identity.
The current display is a prelude to a larger exhibition planned for 2028, which will bring together modern fashion and contemporary art from the Arab world that draw on traditional dress patterns and embroidery motifs. In that sense, the acquisition is not only a preservation effort. It is also a framework for seeing how dress carries memory, authorship, and cultural continuity across time.
