Inscriptions, Iconography, and Individuals in Early Byzantine Egyptian Textiles (original) (raw)

HIDDEN STORIES HUMAN LIVES

THE TEXTILE SOCIETY OF AMERICA

17TH BIENNIAL SYMPOSIUM

OCTOBER 15–17, 2020

VIRTUAL ATTENDANCE

BIENNIAL SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Please note all times are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT-4).

9:45-10:00 am Welcome

10:00 am-12:00 pm Concurrent Sessions 1

Session 1A, Individual Papers: Mexico

• Adriana Sanroman, “From Birth to Death: The Silk Flower Industry in Mexico”
• Suzanne MacAuley, “A Tale of Two Sisters: Invisibility, Marginalization, and Renown in a Twentieth-Century Textile Arts Revitalization Movement in New Mexico”
• Brenda Mondragon Toledo, “Indigenous Textile Circulation in the Fashion Industry: A Case of Mexican Tenango Embroidery”
• Eleanor Laughlin, “The Maker’s Mark?: An Examination of an Embroidered Rebozo and Its Potential Signature”
• Gabrielle Vail and Concepcion Poou Coy Tharin, “Woven Stories and Painted Books: Exploring the Worldviews and Lives of Pre-Hispanic to Contemporary Maya Women”

Session 1B, Roundtable Discussion: Cultural Sustainability and the Craft Economy
Moderator: Lesli Robertson
Discussants: Halle Butvin, Diana N’Diaye, Ashkhen Khudaverdyan
Session 1C, Roundtable Discussion: Handmade in India: Trade, Ethics, and the Craft Economy
Moderator: Ritu Sethi
Discussants: Abduljabbar Mohammad Khatri, Charllotte Kwon, Shilpa Sharma
Session 1D, Individual Papers: Textile Design

• Stephanie Watson Zollinger, “Behind the Curtain: Jack Lenor Larsen and His Textile Collaboration with Swaziland”
• Helena Britt, “Beneath The Cloth: Discovering Collaborative Methods of Textile Designing and Making”

12:15-1:15 pm Keynote Address: “Codex”

Sanford Biggers

1:30-3:30 pm Concurrent Sessions 2

Session 2A, Organized Session: Connective Tissues: Examining Inscribed Textiles from Egyptian Burial Grounds
Organizers: Mary McWilliams and Julie Wertz

• Katie Taronas, “Inscriptions, Iconography, and Individuals in Early Byzantine Egyptian Textiles”

• Meredyth Lynn Winter, “Ṭirāz: A Merger between Embroidery and Tapestry”

• Robin Hanson and Julie H. Wertz, “Materials and Making of Țirāz Textiles”

• Mary McWilliams, “Assigning Value and Constructing Collections: The Accumulation of Țirāz Textiles in American Museums, 1900-1950”

Session 2B, Individual Papers: Reclaiming Traditions

• Juhi Pandey and Raji Ben Vankar, “THEN and NOW: Economic Empowerment One Weave at a Time”
• Magali An Berthon, “Reclaiming Silk Knowledge with Cambodian Weavers: An Action Research Experiment”
• Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, “Transformative Power of Stitchery: Sashiko from Cold Regions of Japan and Embroidery Work of the Nui Project”

Session 2C, Organized Session: Coded Communications: Digital Weaving as Artistic Technology

Organizers: Gabe Duggan and Janie Woodbridge

• Gabe Duggan, “Glitched Metaphors: Dysfunction in Hand-Woven Digital Jacquard”
• Janie Woodbridge, “Giving a Shape to the Invisible”
• Robin Haller, “Translations of Human Experience”
• Kate Nartker, “Textiles: The Original Cinematic Medium”

3:45-5:45 pm Concurrent Sessions 3

Session 3A, Organized Session: Dialogues between Archaeological, Historical, and Contemporary Textiles in the Andes
Organizer: Ann Peters

• Maria Elena del Solar, “The White Haku: The Plain-Woven Mantle, a Long Tradition in North Central Perú”
• Veronica Cereceda, “Three Different Identities, but Garments and Designs Woven in an Inter-Ethnic Dialogue”
• Soledad Hoces de la Guardia, “Textile Memory in Colchane: Weavers Revitalizing the Aymara Tradition”
• Bárbara Cáses, “Ethnoarchaeology of the Textile Chaîne Operatoire: Seeking Evidence of Pre-Hispanic Textile Production in Domestic Sites”
• Yuki Seo, “The Practice of Replication: A Dialogue between Producers in Perú and Japan”
• Rommel Angeles, “Interlacing Past and Present through Textiles: Experiences in the Communities, a Vision from Perú”

Session 3B, Individual Papers: Journeys

• Deborah Valoma, “We Are Still Here: The Armenian Postmemory Project”
• Polly Barton, “Four Artists: Angels and Mentors”
• John Paul Morabito, “Magnificat: Weaving the Queer Face of the Madonna”
• Sania Samad, “Unraveling Stories through Stitches”

Session 3C, Organized Session: Imported Skills: Immigrant Labor in Asiatic Silk Production from the Early Modern to Postmodern Periods
Organizers: Nazanin Hedayat Munroe and Eva Labson

• Sylvia Houghteling, “Histories of Silken Skills: Immigrant Sericulturalists in Early Modern South Asia”

References

Bazalgette, P. (2017) Independent Review of the Creative Industries. [Internet] https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/649980/Independent_Review_of_the_Creative_Industries.pdf [Accessed 15/06/18].

Clark, H. (2015) “New Approaches to Textile Design.” In Jefferies, J., Clark, H. and Wood, D. (eds), The Handbook of Textile Culture. London: Bloomsbury.

McRobbie, A. (1988) British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? London: Routledge.

Valentine, L., Ballie, J., Bletcher, J, Robertson, S. and Stevenson, F. (2017) “Design Thinking for Textiles: let’s make it meaningful.” The Design Journal, 20(1) S964-S976.

Keynote Address: “Codex”

Sanford Biggers

A codex is a manuscript or a repository of writings, observations, ancient annals, and ideas. It is also the title of the ongoing series of textile-based artworks that comprise Sanford Biggers’s traveling monographic exhibition, Codeswitch. Inspired by the long-debated historical narrative that quilts doubled as signposts along Underground Railroad escape routes throughout the nineteenth century, “Codex” explores Sanford Biggers’s mixed media paintings, drawings, assemblages, and sculptures done directly on or made from pre-1900s antique quilts. This process, like social and linguistic codeswitching, recognizes material and temporal plurality, as the quilts signal their original creator’s intent as well as the new layers of meaning given to them through Biggers’s artistic intervention.

Session 2A, Organized Session: Connective Tissues: Examining Inscribed Textiles from Egyptian Burial Grounds

Organizers: Mary McWilliams and Julie Wertz

In Egypt during the late antique and medieval eras, textiles enhanced with inscriptions in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic were cherished objects that served their owners as a visual form of social communication. Through texts, pattern, fibers, and dye colors, they revealed their owners’ communal identity, political alliances, and social strata. The Egyptian textile industry was a vital source of revenue for a series of empires and proved itself remarkably adaptable and assimilative to changing circumstances. It connected populations that were diverse in terms of language, ethnicity, and religious affiliation through complex networks of production and consumption. Following the Arab conquest in 641 and the establishment of a new ruling elite, inscribed textiles with caliphal protocollary texts (tirāz) emerged as the most prestigious textiles, which were subsequently emulated by different groups in Egyptian society. Preserved for centuries in abandoned cemeteries and rubbish heaps by Egypt’s arid climate, these textiles are now abundantly represented in

American museum collections, their presence resulting from the energetic and overlapping efforts of international networks of antiquities dealers, scholars, and collectors.

The papers in this panel draw out connections and meanings embedded in these inscribed textiles through art historical, technical, and historiographic methods of inquiry. The participants on this panel are working collaboratively in support of the exhibition Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Medieval Egyptian Tombs, scheduled to open at the Harvard Art Museums in January 2021.

“Inscriptions, Iconography, and Individuals in Early Byzantine Egyptian Textiles”

Katie Taronas

A small but distinct group of early Byzantine textiles from Egypt (dating between the fourth and sixth centuries) uses woven words and textual symbols for their primary decoration. Ornamented with bold letterforms created in brilliant colors, these objects are all inscribed with personal names-the names of individual men and women for whose lives we possess no other certain evidence. Far from simple labels indicating ownership, these names are integral parts of the textiles’ design and function both as text and as image. Investigating the epigraphic nuances, iconography, styles, and formats of these textiles will allow us to make some inferences about the identities and roles of these people in Late Antique Egyptian society. It will also shed light on some of their hopes and beliefs, for the inscriptions and iconography of these textiles can be interpreted as woven wishes for blessings and protection. This paper will consider this group of textiles as part of the tradition of protective inscriptions widespread in the ancient and Byzantine worlds but known primarily from more durable materials such as jewelry, carved inscriptions, and metalwork.

“Tiräz: A Merger between Embroidery and Tapestry” Meredyth Lynn Winter

The idea that two zones of influence existed in the Islamic world has numerous precedents in scholarly literature. Whether geographic factors, like the agricultural divide between linen and cotton, or geopolitical factors like governing former Roman and Sassanian lands, this is a recurring theme, debating even the innate merits of peoples.

The tiräz fabrics preserved in Egyptian tombs from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, however, offer an alternative model, based on making, to the rise and fall of empires and the indifferent randomness of nature and climate. Communities of makers developed artisanal knowledge within distinct weaving traditions and, when confronted with the products of another group, emulated visual effects and adapted their techniques to suit the new tastes and challenges. Their sustained exchange of concrete, technical know-how

crossed from Egypt to Iraq and Iran and back during this period, and this paper argues that, out of the resulting merger, the tiräz aesthetic was born.

“Materials and Making of Tiräz Textiles” Robin Hanson and Julie Wertz

Most of the Egyptian burial textiles held in collections were excavated with little to no documentation of archaeological provenance, further obscuring their geographic origins, age, and frequently unnamed makers. Technical studies of late antique and Islamic textiles over the last half-century, including examinations of weave structures, dyes analysis, radiocarbon analysis, and cross-sections, have elucidated more about how tiräz were designed and produced, and what raw materials were used in the making. Analytical data shows that techniques and motifs used in art historical methods of dating may correspond to broader periods of time than previously assumed, making technical study a valuable tool for object research. This paper discusses highlights of the technical study undertaken in conjunction with an exhibition of inscribed textiles from medieval Egyptian tombs at Harvard Art Museums, opening in January 2021, and presents the perspectives of a textile conservator with more than twenty years’ experience and a conservation scientist specializing in textile dyes. Their research includes an analysis of dyes used in pre- and post-Islamic conquest pieces, a study of gold thread and gold leaf applique, radiocarbon analysis, and fiber identification.

“Assigning Value and Constructing Collections: The Accumulation of Tiräz Textiles in American Museums, 1900-1950” Mary McWilliams

In the medieval era, Egypt’s textile industry served domestic and international markets, generating and distributing wealth along an elaborate production chain that was overseen and taxed at multiple stages by government administrators. As Egypt’s status shifted within a sequence of empires, the textile-derived revenue was channeled to different entities. Some thousand years later, remnants of the medieval textile industry again found an international market and generated wealth, although through a different type of merchant-the antiquarian-and directed toward a new end consumer-the museum. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, clandestine digging unearthed great numbers of textiles that were brought to market by an international network of art and antiquities dealers. As diverse as their medieval counterparts, these dealers were mostly based in Egypt, but often established offices in major European and American cities.

The vast majority of the recovered textiles became the property of the Arab Museum in Cairo, but textile fragments termed “Coptic” and “Egypto-Arab” also found ready buyers among Western collectors, and North American museums became the second largest repository for tiräz and tiräz-style textiles. This paper examines the intellectual, geo-political, and economic contexts of the first half of the twentieth century during which the combined

efforts of dealers, archeologists, curators, professors, artists, collectors, and philanthropists projected meaning onto, and constructed value for, fragmentary burial garments and shrouds.

Session 2B, Individual Papers: Reclaiming Traditions

“THEN and NOW: Economic Empowerment One Weave at a Time” Juhi Pandey

The Nineteenth Amendment was a watershed moment in women’s rights even though it merely cracked open the door to allow a specific category of women to vote. Much like the women who lost their lives or were ostracized by their families or communities in the fight for the Nineteenth Amendment, the women I worked with in Kutch, a small district in western India, decided to change the course of their community by taking up weaving on the loom, long considered a man’s job.

The semi-arid desert ecology in Kutch had somehow maintained communities that were isolated from the mainland. This condition worsened in 2001 when a 6.9 Richter-scale earthquake devastated the region and its people. When the community rebuilt, the women, who were in the shadows for centuries, decided to step into handloom weaving, a craft in their tradition that was solely for men.

Raji Ben Vankar, forty-two years old and widowed with three children, transformed her family’s life by becoming the primary earner by taking to handloom weaving. Likewise, Champa Ben Siju, twenty-three years old, one of the two daughters of Keshavji Bhai Siju, who taught the traditional skill to his daughters only because he did not have a son! Today he knows she is the reason his family is complete-a rare acceptance in a patriarchal, conservative, and traditional rural Indian town. Their stories span social design, traditional arts, and civil discourse.

As the former director of Khamir Craft Resource Center, I facilitated an exchange program in collaboration with Fieldwork in Wales, United Kingdom. Through a six-month intervention, I created an exhibit called THREADS from the new body of work by these two pioneer women.

The women I worked with are examples of how lives and communities are transformed when women lead, when women decide, and when women succeed.

“Reclaiming Silk Knowledge with Cambodian Weavers: An Action Research Experiment”

Magali An Berthon

This paper is dedicated to a project embedded in action research (AR) conducted in collaboration with the Cambodian textile organization Krama Yuyu over the course of the year 2017. Located in the village of Ta Pouk in Siem