Firstly a reminder that our next OATG online talk takes place this Thursday 23 March at the earlier than usual time of 16:30 GMT. Our speaker is OATG member Monisha Ahmed and her subject is The Fabric of Life – Textiles from the Ladakh Himalayas.
This presentation will explore weaving traditions in Ladakh, discussing the history of fibres and textiles, their use and transformation over time. It will examine changes to the tradition first by the Moravian Missionaries and government Handicraft Centres, and more recently by Ladakhi fashion designers. Dr Ahmed has been involved with textiles in Ladakh for decades. Her doctoral degree from Oxford University developed into the book Living fabric – Weaving among the Nomads of Ladakh Himalaya (2002), and received the Textile Society of America’s R L Shep award in 2003 for best book in the field of ethnic textile studies.
As usual this event is free for OATG members, with a small donation required from non-members. Click here for more details and to register.
The Denver Art Museum are hosting a one-day symposium this Saturday 25 March, both online and in person. The subject is From Workshop to Nomad: New Thinking about Rug Weaving Categories and Design Influences. Its inspiration is the rugs and carpets in the museum’s current exhibitionRugged Beauty: Antique Carpets from Western Asia. The symposium has a highly impressive list of speakers, who have authored important works on the subject. A recording of the symposium will be emailed to all participants after the event, so if the timing doesn’t work for your part of the world you can still enjoy this event. For more details and registration click here.
Iran, Ferahan rug, about 1875. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum
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I highly recommend the following event for those living near Sydney. The Asian Arts Society of Australia (TAASA) are hosting an event from 18:00-20:00 next Monday 27 March celebrating Türkiye’s Rich Heritage. This will include three talks by textile experts Ross Langlands, Frances Ergen and Christina Sumner, as well as delicious Türkish food, with profits going to disaster relief in Türkiye and Syria. Full details and booking information can be found here.
First a reminder of a couple of events covered in the last blog, which take place this week.
The Museum of East Asian Art in Bath is celebrating International Womens’ Day on Wednesday 8 March with a free online talk by Mary Ginsberg, who has curated their current exhibition Revolution, Propaganda, Art: Printmaking in Modern China. The title of her talk is Women in Modern Chinese Prints: Stylish Beauties and Revolutionary Warriors.
“Before the establishment of the PRC, women were much more commonly presented as glamourous, urban beauties. In the 1950s, artists transformed these women into model socialist workers. Until the end of the 1970s, almost all art had political content, and images of women conformed to propaganda requirements. Since the Cultural Revolution, women are shown as individuals, rather than types. This talk will survey Chinese women in 20th century graphics, including advertisements, popular prints and posters.” Museum website
Thursday 9 March sees the opening of an exciting new exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. Ikat: A Compelling World of Cloth runs until 29 May 2023 and showcases over one hundred examples of textiles from across the globe using the ikat technique. These include hangings and coats from Uzbekistan, kimono from Japan, ponchos from Bolivia and several textiles from across Indonesia.
Pardah hanging (detail), late 19th century, Silk Road (Uzbekistan)
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Also taking place on Thursday 9 March are two online talks hosted by the Craft History Workshop – thanks to Sandra Sardjono for sharing this information. The first of these is A Workshop of Women: Byzantine-style Gold-figure Embroidery in 18th Century Istanbul by Catherine Volmensky
This talk “focuses on a workshop active in Istanbul in the eighteenth century, which produced religious textiles with Christian imagery and Ottoman-style ornamental borders. The Greek woman who ran this workshop, Despoineta, was a very skilled artist and embroiderer; her pupils additionally found success creating Byzantine-style gold-figure embroideries, demonstrating the active processes of knowledge transfer. ” – Craft History website.
The second talk is Textiles of Silver and Gold: Exploring the Development and Meanings of Burmese Shwe Chi Doe
These textiles are usually heavily decorated using gold and silver thread, sequins and beads and are also known as kalaga. In this talk Rebecca Hall “explores the connections shwe chi doe textiles have with the multifaceted and multicultural landscape of Burma in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by a glimpse at the continued production of these textiles in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, we can see the influences of immigrating Chinese populations, the connections Burma has had with neighboring India, and the central role of Buddhist stories and practices for a more complete understanding of the connections between craft and national histories.” – Craft History website.
These talks begin at 1400 EST, which is 2200 GMT and are free on Zoom, but you do need to register.
Kalaga from Burma 2023, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, accessed 6 March 2023
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Although the OATG is based in Oxford we are an international group, with a growing membership from outside of the UK. Our Australian members may therefore be interested in this in-person event, which takes place at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide this Saturday 11 March from 10am.
The event starts with the launch of the book Interwoven Journeys: The Michael Abbott Collections of Asian Art, celebrating the generous gifts of textiles, ceramics, sculptures, photographs and paintings from South and Southeast Asia Mr Abbott has donated to cultural institutions in Australia. Some of these textiles form the basis of an exhibition of the same name on show at AGSA until 2 July 2023. On show are textiles from Bali, Sumatra and Java, including the oldest know complete Indonesian batik textile.
Later that day there will be a symposium led by experts in this field, including OATG member Maria Wronska-Friend. Subjects include Javanese batik and Sasak textiles from Lombok.
Indonesia, Ceremonial cloth and sacred heirloom, with two figures in a garden or forest, 1362 – 1422, possibly east Java, reportedly found in Lampung region, Indonesia, cotton with indigo dye, hand-drawn tulis batik, Gift of Michael Abbott AO QC through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2008, Adelaide.
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A new exhibition opens on 16 March at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. It is entitled What That Quilt Knows About Meand features around forty quilts.
“Spanning from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, the works on view will reveal a range of poignant and sometimes unexpected biographies. From a pair of enslaved sisters in antebellum Kentucky to a convalescent British soldier during the Crimean War, the exhibition explores stories associated with both the makers and recipients of the works. ” – Museum website
Possibly West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1875–1895. Cotton, silk, wool, and ink, with cotton embroidery. Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York.
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On 18 March the New England Rug Society will host an online talk by Gerard Paquin on the subject of Silk and Wool: Crosscurrent Influences in Turkish Rugs and Textiles. This talk is co-sponsored by the Hajji Baba Club.
“This presentation will document the influence of Ottoman textile designs on Turkish rugs, and the impetus for those artistic borrowings. It will also examine the impact of rug design on textiles, and the use of both as architectonic elements, in tent as well as town.” – NERS website.
Click here for more details and to register for this free talk which begins at 1300 ET (1800 GMT).
Knotted pile wool rug, Turkey, 14th century. Turkish Islamic Arts Museum, Istanbul
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Last but DEFINITELY not least is the next OATG event, which takes place online on Thursday 23 March at the earlier than usual time of 1630 GMT. Our speaker is OATG member Monisha Ahmed and her subject is The Fabric of Life – Textiles from the Ladakh Himalayas.
This presentation will explore weaving traditions in Ladakh, discussing the history of fibres and textiles, their use and transformation over time. It will examine changes to the tradition first by the Moravian Missionaries and government Handicraft Centres, and more recently by Ladakhi fashion designers. Dr Ahmed has been involved with textiles in Ladakh for decades. Her doctoral degree from Oxford University developed into the book Living fabric – Weaving among the Nomads of Ladakh Himalaya (2002), and received the Textile Society of America’s R L Shep award in 2003 for best book in the field of ethnic textile studies.
As usual this event is free for OATG members, with a small donation required from non-members. Click here for more details and to register.
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
From Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Yemen – the four corners of the Ka’bah – textiles from the Whitworth collection will be brought together, extending to the widest reaches of influence of the Islamic world.
A section of a Kiswa will form the heart of the exhibition. The Kiswa cloth covers the Ka’bah and is replaced each year during Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). Positioned in the direction of Mecca, it will be seen from the very front of the Whitworth, drawing visitors in.
Burnished indigo, silk embroidered robes, tent hangings and Dervish hats stitched with script will surround the Kiswa. From Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Yemen – the four corners of the Ka’bah –textiles from the Whitworth’s collection will be brought together, extending to the widest reaches of influence of the Islamic world.
For more information visit the website of the Whitworth, University of Manchester, UK
Some twenty-five pairs of shoes, slippers, sandals, clogs and boots from North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Central Asia and South Asia are being shown together for the first time. Dating from 1800 onwards, they demonstrate the important role footwear has always played in the social and cultural life of people living in these regions. The display presents a variety of regional styles, materials, embellishments and shoe manufacturing traditions. It examines shoes as status symbols, class indicators and diplomatic gifts.
The display includes shoes for bathing rituals, children, specific vocations, extreme environments and ceremonial occasions. A pair of richly embroidered red leather slippers (tarkasin), made in Ghadamis, Libya, would have formed an important part of a bride’s wedding trousseau. Luxuriant stilted bath clogs (qabqab) from nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkey, over ten inches high, would have been worn by an urban, upper-class woman. A pair of qabqab made in 2014 by Palestinian fashion designer Omar Joseph Nasser-Khoury uses the form of these iconic sandals to comment on contemporary Middle Eastern politics. Delicately patterned men’s leather loafers from early twentieth-century Pakistan (pictured above) combine Western footwear styles with South Asian opulence.
Together, these shoes express identities, beliefs, traditions and lifestyles of people from across the Islamic world. They represent the significance of footwear in Islamic social and cultural life and the impact of international trade and politics on footwear fashions.
For more information, visit the website of the British Museum, London.
Now that the summer holidays have definitely drawn to a close, I’m happy to publish the third installment in our Beattie Archive mini-series from Katherine Clough, all about May Beattie’s summer adventures hunting carpets through Europe and Turkey. Through photographs and excerpts from her diary entries, we can experience some of May’s summer holidays vicariously, and get an insight into how the Beattie Archive was compiled.
For many the summer months are a time for adventures, relaxation and travelling abroad, with September signalling a return to working life. This blog post considers one of May Hamilton Beattie’s own summer excursions – in pursuit of carpets – in the summer of 1965, fifty years ago. Beattie travelled extensively in Europe, Central Asia and North America, visiting and recording carpets she encountered photographically, with analysis sheets and by recording her thoughts in detailed diary entries. In 1965 May and Colin Beattie left their Sheffield home by car to travel on a circuit through Europe to western Turkey and back again, driving through many countries, and stopping to visit rugs en route.
Map roughly showing the Beatties’ route by car in Summer 1965, as deducted from her diary notes in MBA Ref 63.
The opening paragraph of May’s diary shows how their journey did not always go to plan, but once at their destination she launched straight into intensive work on a rug collection:
July 1965
We left Sheffield on Sunday the 18th, crossed as usual to Ostende, after suffering two punctures and discovering a weak-walled tyre on the way down and non-acting brake lights. Hardly a cheerful beginning! We were off the boat by 4.20 a.m. and in Düsseldorf by 10.30. There were more rugs there than I was aware of and some interesting fragments. I worked at top speed and still did not finish everything by 4.30 when we had arranged to meet outside. Col. had missed his way back to the car so I foraged in the lunch basket and sat in the sun outside the Museum and ate brown bread and butter and bananas, having had no lunch.
Car problems would hit several times that summer, with May writing about how she veered the car into a ditch on 26th August, on the road out from Konya in Turkey. Fortunately, neither Colin nor May were hurt and ‘there was not much apparent damage to the car apart from the fact that the gear lever came away in the hand’ on impact (MBA Ref 63, f.669). After a couple of days’ delay waiting for the repair work, they were soon travelling again.
A photograph from another journey to Konya, Turkey, in 1973 captures Beattie’s recording of carpets en route with the carpet photographed while held out in front of a car (MBA Imag 24, f.46).
At the front of her 1965 diary May filed correspondence with museums and collectors that she hoped to visit, sent in advance of their journey. Her diary notes list her encounters with museums, religious buildings and members of the community as well as detailed descriptions of rugs inspected, offering insight into particular carpets, but also into her life as a researcher in the 1960s. For example, a local doctor is very helpful following a visit to a bishop’s house in Romania in early August (MBA Ref 63, f.609):
Pure gold was forthcoming – an official list of the numbers of rugs and fragments at present in the Evangelical churches. This was more than I hoped for, and luckily the typewriter was in the car so that I got to work in the office and copied the list and such correspondence as was relevant.
The thoughtful doctor also provided ‘a letter to look at church rugs, which will allay the fears of the good ladies with the keys, who naturally think it odd that anyone should want to spend a day making notes on rugs’ and the nearby museum allowed her ‘to take small pieces of rug’ (MBA Ref 63, f.609). Textile fragments from another part of the archive are labelled with the same town names as on her 1965 trip – these notes could potentially provide provenance and further contextualization to the material. Beattie built up an extensive collection of such carpet samples, creating a useful resource for today’s researchers, especially as non-destructive methods of analysis are preferred these days for museum artefacts with restrictions on destructive sampling.
This box holds over seven hundred individually-labelled envelopes containing tufts and threads of carpets collected by May Beattie from carpets in museums and field sites on her travels across Europe. A similar box contains a further four hundred samples from rugs in Central Asia, the United States and the Middle East. Both are in the process of being rehoused.
In another research stop-off, Beattie found a Dr Ditroi ‘quite charming’ in facilitating her research: ‘I spent an hour on the floor of his office looking at rugs – a perfectly good but coarse Lotto, kileem style, and a ‘Tintoretto’ type – very odd’ (MBA Ref 63, f. 598). She also recorded her frustrations and the effects of her perseverance in attempting to access some museum stores: one custodian ‘klinked his keys’ and ‘bristled with indignation’ at her persistent determination to visit Turcoman rugs (MBA Ref 63, f. 596). Walking round museums Beattie also noted paintings depicting carpets – an ongoing activity that would build up into her ‘Rugs in Pictures’ image index that makes up seven out of the seventy-five boxes of the total IMAG archive material and over 1,300 folios.
All of May’s diary entries were typed out on the move after long days of viewing carpets, with accommodation often little more than a tent, making the detail included even more remarkable. May did take a short break from research, over two-thirds of the way into their trip – it seems mainly at Colin’s request – to enjoy the scenery of Kuşadası Bird Island, near Ephesus, for a couple of days. They then set off again driving north round to Greece, and on to museum visits in Florence and Milan in Italy. Finally, the last sentence of her travel diary on 9th September 1965, writing from Milan, records her hunting for a different kind of textile: ‘To-morrow we must search out woollen clothes for we are back to northern Europe and its rain and cold’ (MBA Ref 63, f.703).
Katherine Clough
Beattie Archive Assistant
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
Oxford Asian Textile Group blog 