Gatherings of straw-weavers, women who make objects and pictures from straw, have been organised in Tavankut since 1961, when Ana Milodanović, a straw-weaver from Žednik, joined other artists being active in the Art Colony founded that year. Since then, straw-weaving has developed as a technique for artistic expression, and as a logical consequence of this development, the First Colony of Artists of Straw Technique was established in Tavankut in 1986, by the Croatian Cultural and Educational Association Matija Gubec. In the early years, the colony of straw-weavers was also visited by naive painters and sculptors from other parts of the former Yugoslavia, but since the nineties, the colonies have been oriented exclusively on the work with straw (Zelić 2000). As a gathering place for fans of this technique, mainly from Tavankut and the surrounding settlements, the First Colony of Artists of Straw Technique is held in July, lasting for ten days. The program of the colonies is aimed on fostering the original forms of weaving straw, but also on the registration of new phenomena in creation with the straw technique. An important part of the program consists of meetings between straw-makers and art historians, ethnologists, teachers, museologists. Among the names of the participants, there appear those straw weavers who marked the contemporary art of straw technique: Mara Ivković Ivandekić, Ana Crnković, Marija Dulić, Marija Vojnić, Jozefina Skenderović and others. In the collection of pictures owned by the colony, first and foremost, there are those works that are made during the colony, or that are the authors’ gifts, and these are kept in the premises of HKPD Matija Gubec in Tavankut.
Ljubica Vuković Dulić
Bibliography:
1. Zelić Naco (2000): Protiv zaborava – Hrvatsko kulturno prosvjetno društvo „Matija Gubec“ Tavankut 1946. – 1996. Hrvatska matica iseljenika i Udruga vojvođanskih i podunavskih Hrvata, Zagreb.