New Year, new textile events!

On Wednesday 17th January 2024 the Oriental Rug and Textile Society (ORTS) will hold their first in person lecture of the year in London. The speaker is Avalon Fotheringham of the V&A, and her subject is Connecting Threads: New Investigations into Madras Handkerchief Exchanges between South India and the Caribbean.

“Connecting Threads is an AHRC+NEH funded humanities project dedicated to exploring how Indian cotton weavers and their customers across the Global South impacted wider fashion histories. The project is now entering the second phase of its pilot case study, which focused on the South Indian ‘Madras Handkerchief’ and the impacts of its consumption in the Caribbean. This lecture will summarise the project’s findings, including new discoveries which shed light on the possible origins of Madras and the importance of the Caribbean market to global trade and fashion.” – ORTS website

The talk begins at 18:30 GMT and is free for members. Guests are welcome upon payment of a small fee, but do need to contact Dimity Spiller in advance.

Linen Day, Roseau, Dominica – A Market Scene, by Agostino Brunias, c.1780. Yale Centre for British Art.

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Also taking place on Wednesday 17th January 2024 is the first online lecture in a series hosted by the Washington-based Textile Museum. These lectures will all be given by authors who have contributed to the most recent issue of the Textile Museum Journal. The speaker is Nikolaos Vryzidis, who specialises in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He will be discussing a fourteenth century Asian silk in a monastic Greek manuscript. Dr Vryzidis will demonstrate how the “study of this rare and intricately patterned textile can contribute to our knowledge of the importation and dissemination of Asian silk damasks and damask-like fabrics in late medieval Europe.” – Textile Museum website

This online talk begins at noon EST, 09:00 PST, which is 17:00 GMT and you can register for it here.

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On Thursday 18th January 2024 the Katonah Museum in New York State will hold an online talk linked to their current exhibition on Syrian textiles (which closes on 28th January). In Syrian Textiles Up Close leading experts Deniz Beyazit and Julia Carlson will “discuss how the fine garments designed and created by skilled artisans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal social and cultural traditions.” – Katonah Museum website

This free talk takes place at 14:30 PT, 17:30 ET, 22:30 GMT.

Man’s abaya (cloak), from Aleppo or Damascus, late 19th-early 20th century

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The London Antique Rug and Textile Art Fair (LARTA) runs from Tuesday 23rd to Sunday 28th January 2024 in Battersea Park. According to their website this is “the UK’s leading annual fair dedicated to the appreciation of antique rug and textile art. Our specialist event brings together quality decorative pieces and interesting collectors’ items presented by some of the UK and Europe’s most dynamic and knowledgeable dealers.

Our aim is to promote this vibrant art form to a wide audience, and offer a tempting array of textiles and weavings for sale. The scope of our interest is broad, and includes weavings from the Far East, Central Asia, Persia, India, Turkey, the Caucasus as well as from Europe and Africa, and from all periods up to the early 20th century. Customers typically include collectors, interior decorators and designers, private buyers and international dealers.” – LARTA website

Information on the exhibitors can be found on their website.

Image from a past LARTA Fair. © The Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair / John Englefield

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Wednesday 24th January 2024 sees the second of the Textile Museum talks by authors featured in its journal. The speakers are Anna Jolly of the Abegg-Stiftung and Corinne Mühlemann from the University of Bern. They will be discussing two velvet Iranian letter pouches, which are currently held in the Danish National archives. They believe that the letters which these pouches once held can help to date the textiles to pre-1637.

“By placing the two letter pouches in the context of diplomatic exchange between the Safavid court and a European court, this case study highlights the role luxury textiles played in 17th-century Iranian diplomacy.” – Textile museum website 

This online talk begins at noon EST, 09:00 PST, which is 17:00 GMT and you can register for it here.

© Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen. Photo by Pernille Klemp.

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On Saturday 27th January 2024 the Textile Museum Associates of Southern California will host and online talk by Professor Walter Denny entitled How We Look at Turkish Carpets: James F. Ballard and a New Way of Collecting. In this talk Professor Denny “will focus on carpets from the Ottoman Empire acquired by early 20^th century American collector James Ballard.  Ballard’s collection, today divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum, has influenced a century of American carpet collecting and changed the way we look at carpets made in Anatolian workshops, villages, and nomadic encampments.” – TMA/SC

This Zoom talk takes place at 10:00 PT, 13:00 ET, which is 18:00 GMT and you can register for it here.

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The final talk in the Textile Museum journal series takes place on Wednesday 31st January. This time the speaker is Yu-Ning Chen and her subject is Mosurin Wool Textiles in Imperial Japan.

“Chen discusses military-related patterns on mosurin fabric, representations of mosurin in print media, including Japanese prewar textbooks, and descriptions of both the consumer culture surrounding this fabric and the female factory labor involved in its production in modern Japanese literature.” – Textile museum website

This online talk begins at noon EST, 09:00 PST, which is 17:00 GMT and you can register for it here.

Photo courtesy of Mukogawa Women’s University.

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Next some OATG news. Our AGM will take place on Saturday 17th February 2024 at 14:00 in the usual venue of the Ashmolean Museum Learning Centre. The formal proceedings will be followed by a Show and Tell, which is always a lively event. The Eventbrite invitations will be sent out in due course.

Image from a previous Show and Tell

Those who attended last year’s Show and Tell may remember Peter Umney-Gray and his scissor bags.

Short (24.2cm) and long (44.8cm) scissors with appropriate Shahsavan bags (29cm and 47cm), showing how short bags could possibly have been used for short sheep scissors.

Peter’s book Scissor Bags & Sheep Scissors in the Nomadic Tradition has now been published. With 292 pages and 299 illustrations this should surely satisfy any readers’ curiosity about this subject! It is available for £55 plus postage from Argali Publishing.

“Scissor bags, and the end-pivot sheep scissors they contained, have not until now been given the attention they deserve. The utilitarian purpose and ephemeral nature of these mainly woven objects by nomadic pastoralists have meant that not many of them survive….. The results of field research among the Shahsavan of Northwest Iran, the Sarıkeçeli Türkmen of the Toros Mountains, Türkiye, and the Uygurs of Xinjiang help to shed light on this tradition….” – Peter Umney-Gray

Inscribed end-pivot sheep scissors, Iran, lying on a scissor bag.

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OATG members who were unable to attend recent events will be glad to know that the recordings of the talks given by Sheila Fruman (Pull of the Thread: Textile Travels of a Generation) and Patricia Cheesman (Unravelling Tai Textiles from Laos) are available to view via the password-protected section of our website. Click here, then on the Members Resources link and enter the password.

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A plethora of new talks and exhibitions!

It was a pleasure to see so many members take part in our recent AGM, and even more so that several of our overseas members were able to present textiles from their collections at the Show and Tell.

February certainly looks like being a busy month with lots of online talks and exhibitions. I’m listing them here in date order, as sadly several of them take place on the same date.

On 20 February there are no less than three online talks that I am aware of! The first of these is hosted by the Textile Museum, with Lawrence Kearney looking at American Coverlets for Rug Lovers. “In this virtual talk, carpet and textile dealer Lawrence Kearney will explore the varied art form of American wool coverlets from 1780 to 1830.

Woollen coverlets from the early 19th century are one of the great American art forms. They are often beautiful, plentiful and affordable. They were made, primarily, by itinerant weavers who travelled throughout New England and the Midwest from c. 1810 through the 1840s. After introducing the four main types of coverlets — over-shot, double-weave, winter-and-summer, and Jacquard-loomed (“figured and fancy”) — Kearney will explore the pleasures these 200-year-old woollen textiles can hold for rug lovers.” Textile Museum website.

Space for this session is limited so you are encouraged to register early.

A woman in Houaphan Province, Laos, models the hand-reeled silk, naturally dyed shaman cloth she wove on her handbuilt loom. ©Above The Fray.

Next is a Zoom Panel presented by WARP (Weave A Real Peace). This will take place at 1300 EST, which is 1800 in the UK. The panel will consist of Gunjan Jain, who “made a conscious switch from working for fast fashion industries to slow, sustainable fashion and set up Vriksh, a design studio that collaborates with handloom weavers in Odisha and other states in India.  Uddipana Goswami …. a feminist peace researcher turned peace entrepreneur who promotes eco-conscious traditional/indigenous crafts from India’s conflict-ravaged Northeast periphery, and Maren Beck, [who with] her husband Joshua founded Above the Fray: Traditional Hill Tribe Art in 2007 in order to document, support, and introduce to the world the incredible traditional textiles arts and cultures of Laos and Vietnam.” Maren and Joshua are the co-authors of Silk Weavers of Hill Tribe Laos. This talk is free, but registration is essential!

If rugs are more your thing then the talk hosted by the New England Rug Society might be for you. This also takes place at 1300 EST on 20 February, when Alberto Levi will speak on Rugs of the Golden Triangle. “While in Tibet in the early ’90s, hunting, in his words, “for the next Seljuk animal carpet,” Alberto Levi “stumbled across an entirely different kind of animal.” In time, what seemed to be a casual encounter yielded a distinct group of carpets, which Alberto labels “Tibetan Golden Triangle.” Far from being Tibetan, this elusive family of rugs, most of them fragmentary, appears to originate from a triangular region defined at its extremes by eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and Northwest Persia. How and why these rugs ended up in Tibet is yet another part of the mystery that Alberto will investigate in his talk. ” NERS Newsletter. NERS members will automatically receive a link. Non-members wishing to attend should email committee member Jean Hoffman to receive theirs.

Temple hanging, artist unknown, Gujarat 20th century

On Monday 22 February the Fowler Museum will host one of its regular Lunch and Learn sessions. Joanna Barrkman, the Fowler’s Senior Curator of Southeast Asia and Pacific Arts, will explore embroidered Jain temple and shrine hangings that offer insights into the religious beliefs and imagery of the Jain faith. This short talk will take place at 1430 PST which is 2230 GMT. Click here to register for this free event.

In addition to all of the above there is also the series of four talks hosted by the Textile Museum Journal that I covered in my previous blog. These are:- Elena Phipps on Brilliance, Colour and the Manipulation of Light in Andean textile Traditions (17th) , Raquel Santos and colleagues on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Asian Textiles in Portuguese Collections (24th) and Walter Denny on Colour, Expectations and Authenticity in Oriental Carpets (26th). The talk by Dominique Cardon on Dyers’ Notebooks in Eighteenth Century England and France, which was scheduled for 10 February has been cancelled. However the good news is that one of Dr Cardon’s co-researchers, Dr Anita Quye, will now take her place for this talk on 10 March instead.

Buddhist robe (kesa), flowers in baskets. Japan, Edo period (1615-1868). Silk and gold brocade. ©Alan Kennedy

Don’t forget that the following day, Saturday 27 February, the Textile Museum Associates of Southern California will host an online talk by Alan Kennedy entitled Kesa: ‘Patchwork’ Buddhist Monks’ Robes in Japan, From Austere to Luxurious. This will take place at 10am Pacific time which is 1800 in the UK. “Kesa is the Japanese word for the traditional patchwork garment worn by Buddhist monks and nuns. These garments are among the earliest documented articles of clothing in Japan, based on inventory records dating to the 8th century. The history of kesa in Japan is of significance for both sacred and secular reasons. They served as a vehicle for both the transmission of Buddhism and of luxury textiles to Japan from the Asian mainland. Kesa that have been preserved in Japan are made of a wide variety of materials, ranging from monochrome bast fibre to sumptuous imported gold brocades. ….. This talk will survey kesa from its earliest history to modern times.” TMA/SC. Registration for this talk is available here.

Ensemble from Southern Moravia in Slovakia (KSUM 1995.17.574 a-e)

A new exhibition opened this week at Kent State University Museum, which will run until 19 December 2021. Entitled Stitched: Regional Dress Across Europe this exhibition showcases common features shared by regional costume across Europe. “In its original context in villages, regional dress carefully marked social and cultural differences. Religious affiliation, gender, age, and marital status were all instantly recognisable at a glance by members of the community. A person’s outfit signalled which village or region they came from. Focusing on these signs of difference obscures the common vocabulary that rural residents across Europe used to shape their clothing. By organising the pieces on display according to shared features, this exhibition highlights the commonalities across the continent rather than their differences. The pieces on view span Western and Eastern Europe including examples from Norway, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Romania and Albania. The development of elaborate regional dress was not a result of the isolation of their wearers but a signal of their integration into broader European society.” KSU website.

Quilt depicting scenes of domestic life and biblical scenes. Created by Minnie Melissa Burdick in 1876. ©Shelburne Museum

The Shelburne Museum in Vermont was the first to exhibit quilts as works of art. Most of the pieces in their collection were produced in New England in the nineteenth century. They recently launched a new online exhibition entitled Pattern and Purpose: American Quilts, which features high-quality images of a selection of their quilts, along with detailed background information on each one. There is also an excellent video in which Katie Wood Kirchhoff previews the exhibition and explains more about the history of the collection and about certain specific quilts. The catalogue of quilt patterns produced by the Ladies Art Company certainly made me smile.

Women’s festive headdress called a shamshur. End of the 19th century Sami, Arkhangel. ©REM

The Russian Museum of Ethnography has a new mini-exhibition which will run until 28 February. The subject is Glass Decor in the Traditional Costume of the Peoples of the Baltic and Barents Regions. The exhibition showcases textiles which are adorned using different types of glass decorations and were made in the second half of the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The quality of the images is very good, and there is a toggle at the top of the page to change the language to English.

Early 20th century. Leather, satin, silk, wool and metal thread embroidery, weaving tassels. Artisan Saadagul Mademinova, Southern Kyrgyzstan

The ethnographic collection of the Gapar Aitiev Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts is highlighted in this article in Voices on Central Asia. In it Mira Djangaraсheva, the ex-director of the museum, Aigul Mambetkazieva, the chief conservator, and Chinara Daniyarova, a conservator, tell the story of the museum and describe some of its exhibits. The collection currently consists of over 18,000 items, including embroidered wall panels, felts, a fantastic pair of embroidered leather riding trousers and much, much more. Do take a look!

OATG member Sarah Fee, Senior Curator, Global Fashion and Textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum has informed us of the decision to extend the deadline for the IARTS Textiles of India grant until 15 May 2021. This biennial grant of $15,000 CAD “can be used anywhere in the world by anyone in the world toward a project that enhances knowledge about Indian textiles, dress, or costume”. The scope really is very broad, and can include research, fieldwork and creative work. Please click here for full details of how to apply.

Removing the bindings from the warp threads on Savu. ©David Richardson

Don’t forget the February issue of Asian Textiles will be out later this month. Our next online talk will be on 20 March when Genevieve Duggan will speak on People without history in eastern Indonesia, powerful or powerless? This will focus on the island of Savu, where Genevieve has conducted research over several decades. More details in my next blog!

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.