Registration Details:
REGISTRATION FOR THIS PROGRAM IS NOW FULL. If you would like to be on the waitlist, please email caroline@textilesociety.org.
Member Rate: $125
Nonmember Rate: $145
Student and New Professional Member Rate: $45
One scholarship is available to a TSA Member – application deadline March 23rd (notification April 10th)
For questions about the program please contact TSA Board Member Lauren Whitley
For questions about registration please contact Caroline Charuk
Program Description:
Join the Textile Society of America for the rare opportunity to study textiles from the late Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic world in two Washington, DC collections: The Textile Museum and Dumbarton Oaks. This curator-led program will take participants into the storage rooms of these two institutions for a behind-the-scenes look at preparations for their collaborative exhibition. Featuring furnishing textiles created in the Eastern Mediterranean region from the fourth through twelfth centuries, the exhibition is scheduled to open in 2019.
Expert guides:
Sumru Belger Krody is Senior Curator at the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum. Her research interest is late antique and Islamic textiles with special focus on influence of textile techniques and structures on artistic, social and economic power of textiles. She has worked in curatorial capacity for more than fifteen The Textile Museum exhibitions. Over the years she has authored and co-authored four books written to accompany some of her major exhibitions: The Sultan’s Garden: the Blossoming of Ottoman Art (2012), Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats (2010), Harpies, Mermaids, and Tulips: Embroidery of the Greek Islands and Epirus Region (2006) and Flowers of Silk and Gold: Four Centuries of Ottoman Embroidery (2000).
Sumru was co-chair of the organizing committee for The 13th Biennial Textile Society of America Symposium (September 2012, Washington, DC). She has also served on the board of Textile Society of America.
Lee Talbot is Curator of Eastern Hemisphere Collections at The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., where he specializes in East Asian textile history. Before joining The Textile Museum staff, he spent two and a half years as curator at the ChungYoung Yang Embroidery Museum at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea. His recent exhibitions include Bingata! Only in Okinawa (2016), Stories of Migration: Contemporary Artists Interpret Diaspora (2016) and China: Through the Lens of John Thomson (2015). Publications include chapters on China and Korea in History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400-2000 (Bard Graduate Center/Yale University Press, 2013), Threads of Heaven: Textiles in East Asian Ritual and Ceremony (Sookmyung Women’s University Press, 2006), and articles on various aspects of decorative art and design history.
Lee is a Director at Large of the Textile Society of America.
Gudrun Buehl is Curator and Museum Director at Dumbarton Oaks and is in charge of the art collections at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington D.C. A Byzantine art historian by training, she joined the staff in 2004 and since then has been responsible for the re-design and re-installation of the museum galleries. She is the curator of a new series of small special exhibitions at Dumbarton Oaks beginning in 2008. Currently Buehl is leading an international, collaborative research project to publish the holdings of Byzantine and early Islamic textiles and to share the knowledge of the Dumbarton Oaks collections with a wider public through a joint exhibition planned together with colleagues at the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum.
Elizabeth (Betsy) Dospel Williams is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Byzantine Art History, splitting her time between the Dumbarton Oaks Museum Department and the Department of Art History at the George Washington University. At Dumbarton Oaks, she works on a collaborative cataloguing project and exhibition project on late antique and medieval textiles headed by Gudrun Bühl. She has researched Byzantine and Islamic jewelry, Egyptian textiles, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century antiquities market.
Itinerary:
8:00am Registration, coffee, exhibition viewing at Textile Museum – GW Foggy Bottom campus, DC
9:15am Depart by bus for Textile Museum storage facility – GW Science and Technology campus, Ashburn, VA
10:00-12:00pm View textiles
12-1:00pm Lunch
1:00pm Depart Textile Museum storage facility; bus to Dumbarton Oaks, Georgetown, DC
2:00 – 4:30pm View textiles at Dumbarton Oaks
5:00pm Optional happy hour/dinner on own in Georgetown
Textiles Close Up is a series of study-workshops launched in 2013 that provides opportunities to examine textiles in leading museum and private collections, guided by renowned experts. Workshops focus on the exploration of the materials, techniques, styles, culture and history of selected textile traditions, which vary for each event. The format offers first-hand, close-up viewing of textiles in the storerooms, laboratories and study rooms of various institutions offering unprecedented access and learning opportunities.
