Event: Caucasian Textiles and Carpets in the Georgian National Museum

Event date: Tuesday 2 July 2019 18:00

Fresh from giving a paper at the HALI Symposium we are delighted that Professor Dr Irina Koshoridze will give a talk to the OATG on the subject of Caucasian Textiles and Carpets in the Georgian National Museum. In it she will present the richness and variety of Caucasian textiles, carpets, and traditional costumes found in the museums of Tbilisi. She will explore how traditional arts and crafts techniques changed and developed against the background of different political circumstances in Georgia. Products of a thoroughfare between East and West, Caucasian textiles from the Georgian region reveal the influences of the Persians and Ottomans who variously ruled over the region and much of the Orthodox Christian world.

© Federica Gigante

Dr Irina Koshoridze is Professor of Art History and Theory at the State University in Tbilisi and Chief Curator of the Georgian National Museum, as well as Director of the State Museum of Folk and Applied Arts of Georgia. She has co-authored several books including Stars of the Caucasus: Antique Azerbaijan Silk Embroideries, Flat-Woven Rugs & Textiles from the Caucasus, Treasures of the Georgian National Museum, and the Oriental Collections of the Georgian National Museum.

© Federica Gigante

© Federica Gigante

Unfortunately the future direction of one of these museums seems to now be under threat. Earlier this year the Museum of Folk and Applied Arts was put under the care of the Georgian Museum of Cinema, Theatre, Choreography and Music – clearly not a suitable fit for it. William Dunbar, journalist and long-time Georgia resident, wrote an article about this for HALI – see image below – describing how the Folk and Applied Arts museum traces its roots to an attempt in the late nineteenth century by the Russians to encourage handicraft enterprises in this area. They made a detailed record of all of the textiles they could find at that time, which included taking photographs of classic Caucasian rugs in the places where they were originally found. 

© William Dunbar. Shared with his kind permission.

 

 

Location: The Pauling Centre, 58a Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6QS.

Date: Tuesday, 2nd of July 2019

Time: 6 pm for a 6.15 pm start

OATG events are free for members and £3 for non-members

 

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Event: Turkish Legacy in Anatolian Kilims

Event date: 5 September 2018 at 18:30

 

 

This lecture by Sumru Belger Krody, senior curator at the Textile Museum, Washington DC shows how nomadic Anatolian women, descended from Turkmen nomads, wove colourful, visually stunning kilims that reveal their culture’s aesthetic preferences for decorating their surroundings. Today, these kilims are the only surviving tangible evidence of their makers’ nomadic lifestyle – a poignant legacy given that women generally did not have an external voice in this patriarchal society. The exhibition A Nomad’s Art: Kilims of Anatolia will be open before the talk.

This lecture is free, but reservations are required. For more details of this event held at the Textile Museum, Washington DC, click here

 

Event: ORTS Film Night

 

 

Event date: Wednesday 20 June 2018 at 6.30pm, St. James Piccadilly 

As part of their summer programme the Oriental Rug and Textile Society (ORTS) will be hosting a film night focussing on the Bakhtiari.

Antony Wynn, who spent many years living in rural Iran, will be showing two films about the migration of the Bakhtiari tribes.  The first one “Grass” is a classic silent film made in 1925 by three Americans who made their way across Turkey and Iraq to meet the Bakhtiari in their winter quarters  and follow them and their flocks over swollen rivers and up over snow-covered mountain passes to reach their summer pastures.  It is a very dramatic film and shows clearly how tough life was for the nomads in those days.

The second film “People of the Wind” was made by the late Shusha Guppy in 1976, following the same route with descendants of the same people, and it shows what had changed and what had stayed the same over those fifty years. This could be a long evening, so there will be an interval between the two films.

The doors open from 6pm with drinks and snacks being served. Non-members are welcome at a charge of £7 (£5 for students).

For details of the location visit the ORTS website

Article: Portable Storage Bags

Recently I posted about the exhibition on portable storage bags at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – ending 7 June 2018. Even if you can’t make it to the exhibition I highly recommend looking at their website, which has a wealth of information about these bags – how they are used, who made them, the techniques they used etc.

The different types of bags are examined, with examples of their use given. Specific bags were used to store salt, flour, bedding, spindles etc.

The section on the tribes covers the Qashqai, the Shahsevan and the Bakhtiari. It includes a fascinating short documentary about the Bakhtiari, filmed in 1925.

Slit-tapestry rugs from Turkey, called kilims, were woven in a wide range of sizes and formats for a wide variety of uses. Rugs associated with the market town of Reyhanlı, on the Turkish-Syrian border, were produced by nomad groups who moved to upland Taurus mountain pastures in the summer, returning to the Mediterranean littoral during winter months.

Besides the characteristic technique of mainly slit-tapestry (kilim), the splendid double saddlebags from Reyhanlı (called heybe in Turkish) sometimes include metallic-wrapped cotton threads, which the nomadic weavers could not produce themselves but had to acquire, probably in exchange for sheep or goat milk, cheese, or other products from their animals.

One such saddlebag is examined in greater detail by Associate Research Scientist Federico Caro, with particular attention being paid to the use of copper metallic thread that resembled gold.

In another section of the website conservators Julia Carlson and Yael Rosenfield examine the sumak technique, with lots of excellent detailed photographs.

It’s rare to see so much excellent background information for an exhibition – hope you enjoy reading it.

Event: Persian Carpets and Renaissance Revivals – A Cross-Cultural Itinerary

 

 

Event date: 3 May 2018, 18:00-19:00, London.

This talk by Dr Eva-Maria Troelenberg of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence will trace the history and fate of a prominent Safavid (16^th century) medallion carpet. The piece had been traded to Europe probably at some point in Early Modern history. It was purchased in Venice in the late 19th century by Renaissance connoisseur and museum man Wilhelm Bode, was displayed as one of the core pieces of the “Persian-Islamic Department” of the Berlin Museums after 1904, destroyed during the Second World War, and resurrected by means of restoration and publication in the 1950s. The itinerary of this textile on the one hand reflects the central—at times ideological—position of Persian culture within an emerging canon of Islamic arts during the first half of the 20th century. On the other hand, its material history of discovery, display, destruction and reconstruction challenges the teleological notion that is inherent to many cross-cultural museum collections.

Admission to this talk at The Courtauld Institute of Art in the Strand is free but registration is required through the link below.

For more information visit the website of The Courtauld Institute of Art

Exhibition: Portable Storage: Tribal Weavings from the Collection of William and Inger Ginsberg

Exhibition dates: 25 September 2017 – 7 May 2018, New York

 

Woven bags carried by nomads in the Middle East were designed to contain all of the necessities of life, from bedding to salt. This exhibition highlights 19 distinctly patterned examples of woven bags from nomadic cultures in Iran, Turkey, and the Caucasus, along with one striking pile-woven saddle cover. Featuring geometric patterns as well as stylised floral and animal motifs, these textiles are both utilitarian and expressive of a highly sophisticated tribal aesthetic.  The exhibition also includes an Islamic painting from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection that illustrates bags and trappings in use in traditional society.

For more information visit the website of the Metropolitan Museum

Article: Alive with artisans – Cairo’s al-Darb al-Ahmar district – a photo essay

 

 

“Whatever manufactured items there are in the world,” wrote the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi in 1671, “the poor of Cairo get hold of them, set them out and trade in them.” Nearly 350 years later, this tradition lives on in al-Darb al-Ahmar. This neighbourhood of 100,000 people, south-east of central Cairo, is said to be home to a thousand workshops. The place teems with artisans crafting everything from tents, books, boxes and brass lanterns to glass bowls and silk carpets.

The Street of the Tentmakers captures this commercial spirit. Built in 1650 as an arcade, this covered street is a succession of workrooms whose interiors are lined with decorative textiles. From his cubic cavity in the Ottoman-era wall, a weaver called Hasan says that al-khayyamiya, the craft of tentmaking, goes back to the time of the pharaohs. Some of today’s weavers are descended from the families who would produce the kiswa, the fabric that covered the great stone at Mecca, as well as tents, cloths and saddles for those setting out on pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest site.

This article gives an excellent overview of this district of Cairo with its weavers, dyers, bookbinders, carpet makers, glass blowers and lantern makers, explaining how many of the buildings have been restored with the help of the Aga Khan Development Network.

To read the full article visit the website of the Guardian

A free exhibition of photographs entitled The artisans of al-Darb al-Ahmar: life and work in historic Cairo is also taking place from 23 March – 24 April at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

For more information visit their website here

Exhibition: Rushnyky – Sacred Ukrainian Textiles

Exhibition dates: 15 February – 3 June 2018

 

 

This exhibition celebrates and explores Ukrainian culture through one of its most ancient and valued traditions.

A rushnyk is a long, rectangular cloth, typically made from linen or hemp, which is woven in one solid piece and sometimes adorned with bright, intricate patterns. They are traditionally made by women, who start learning to spin, weave, and embroider the cloths at a very young age.

Rushnyky are ritual objects used in ceremonies from birth to death. Newborns are immediately laid on a rushnyk; intricate wedding formalities utilise several rushnyky; coffins are sometimes lowered into the ground with rushnyky.

This exhibit of over 80 rushnyky, Ukrainian icons, and related artefacts comes from the collection of Franklin Sciacca, Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Hamilton College in New York.

For more information visit the website of  The Museum of Russian Icons Clinton, Massachusetts.

News: Textile Museum Journal Relaunched

After a hiatus of more than ten years, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum are pleased to announce the relaunch of the Textile Museum Journal.

Established in 1962, the Textile Museum Journal is the leading publication for the exchange of textile scholarship in North America. The peer-reviewed journal promotes high-quality research on the cultural, technical, historical and aesthetic significance of textiles from Asian, African and indigenous American cultures. Last issued in 2004, the journal resumed annual publication last month, thanks to a Founding Patron gift from the Markarian Foundation, and is now available in an online format.

Table of Contents
Textile Museum Journal, Volume 44

Toward a Grammar of Textiles: A Reconsideration of Medieval Textile Aesthetics and the Impact of Modern Collecting
Arielle Winnik

Nomad Textile Bags from Central Asia in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Geographic Distribution, Decoration, Semantics
Irina Bogoslovskaya

Through the Renaissance Frame: Carpets and the Beginnings of ‘Islamic Art’ in Nineteenth-Century Vienna and Berlin
Denise-Marie Teece

Pope Innocent VIII’s Mamluk Carpets from Cairo in Context: Their Manufacture and Acquisition
Rosamond E. Mack

Rethinking Mamluk Carpet Origins
Gerald Pollio

For more information, visit the website of the Textile Museum, Washington DC.

Event: World Textile Day North – Frodsham, Cheshire

Event date: Saturday 23 September 2017, 10am – 4:30pm

Every year at World Textile Days around the country, the organisers explore a common theme through their free exhibition, and morning and afternoon presentations (only £3 per session). In 2017, their world textile experts will focus on the role of colour in textiles.

FREE admission to our exhibition of woven, printed and embroidered textiles from around the world.

FAIR TRADE MARKET from makers, workshops and villages around the world.

Plus:

• 11 am presentation. Magie Relph – quilter, collector, textile trader and author of African Wax Print: A Textile Journey.
• 2 pm Show & Tell. Bring and discuss your own world textile with one of our world textile experts. Plus: a short talk.
  £3 per session or £5 for both, tickets at the door.
• Throughout the day: demonstrations by the Braid Society.

With these specialist world textile traders:

• Textile Traders – Jim and Diane Gaffney
• The African Fabric Shop – Magie Relph and Bob Irwin
• Tukuru South American Textiles – Meri Hunneyball
• Khayamiya Egyptian Appliqué – Joan and John Fisher
• Indian Textiles – Tanya Byrne
• Nepalese Textiles – Karen Haggis
• Indian Silk – Suzy Rowe

Delicious refreshments provided by our hosts Frodsham Patchwork Group. Disabled access. Free parking. Station: Frodsham.

Venue: Frodsham Community Centre, Fluin Lane (B5439), Frodsham, Cheshire, WA6 7QN.

For more information, visit the World Textile Day website.