February 25, 2005
Petals
and Plumage: Indian Textiles through March 20
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Border
fragment of a pichwai with lotuses and parrots (detail) |
On display at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
is Petals and Plumage, a rich and varied exhibition of some
of the finest
Indian textiles in the world.
Running
through March 20, the show celebrates the aesthetic and technical
diversity
of Indian textiles
and attests to India’s preeminence in textile production
throughout history.
The works
are all drawn from an extraordinary private collection that
displays the range of ornamentation within
Indian traditions and also demonstrates the many uses of textiles
in Indian culture. Visitors will see examples of a broad range
of production techniques, including painting, block printing,
ikat, tie-dye, brocade, tapestry, and embroidery, spanning
600 years of the history, graphic beauty, and technical precision
of this remarkable tradition.
The history
of textiles from India over the last two millennia has been
closely linked with the history of global trade.
Romans wrote of Indian brocades as cloth
of gold. Cottons, silks, and Kashmir shawls were highly prized in Europe
and America during the colonial period, and in earlier
times cotton fabrics from
India were objects of prestige in Southeast Asia and the countries around
the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The mastery of Indian
spinners, dyers, and weavers
over their materials was renowned and not attained elsewhere in the world
until the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the
concomitant invention of mechanical
looms and chemical dyes.
The exhibition is all the more rewarding given the rarity of Indian textiles.
Climate, insect damage, and usage have contributed to their rapid deterioration.
In addition, worn cloth woven with gold or silver thread often was burned
to reclaim the precious metals. This exhibition includes rare examples from
the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The
counter is
1,237
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