Curator Talk | A Tale of Two Textiles: Exchange and Conflict in Eighteenth-Century South India

Unraveling histories of design through eighteenth-century textiles from South Asia

John Guy, the Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will present on two extraordinary painted cotton cloths from south India that demonstrate the dynamics of the international textile trade in the first half of the eighteenth century.

By reading their design histories and cultural memories, Guy will show how these two pictorial cloths offer a richer understanding of the complexities of textile design, commissioning, production and consumption across a landscape that reached from Europe to Japan. Guy will also explore the territorial and commercial ambitions and conflict that marked eighteenth-century south India as the backdrop against which these textiles were produced.

John Guy, FSA, FAAAS, will be introduced by Zoe S. Kwok, the Museum’s Nancy and Peter Lee Senior Curator of Asian Art, and Anu Ramaswami, director of the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India and the Sanjay Swani ’87 Professor of India Studies and professor of civil and environmental engineering.

The talk will conclude with a Q&A led by Fatima Quiraishi, assistant professor of art and archaeology.

Reception to follow.

Cosponsored by the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Center for Global India (OWNER)