“How We Look at Turkish Carpets: James F. Ballard and a New Way of Collecting” with Prof. Walter B. Denny Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
In this live illustrated talk, Walter Denny will focus on carpets from the Ottoman Empire acquired by early 20th-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.
Walter B. Denny is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, specializing in the art of the Islamic world. From 2007 to 2016 he served as Senior Consultant in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After undergraduate study at Robert College (Istanbul), Grinnell College, and Oberlin College, and graduate studies at Harvard and at Istanbul Technical University, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 1970, beginning his teaching career at UMass/Amherst in September of that year.
Professor Denny’s research interests and publications concentrate on the Ottoman Turkish sphere. He has also taught, pursued research, and published on the thousand-year history of east-west interchange in European culture. He lectures frequently on a variety of topics in the U.S. and abroad.
Hosted by Textile Museum Associates of Southern California
This lecture is free and registration is required.
Register here:http://tinyurl.com/
Image: 16th c. Turkish Carpet, St. Louis Art Museum
