Looking at ‘Received Wisdom’ about Oriental Carpets
St. Louis Art Museum, The James F. Ballard Collection of Oriental Rugs exhibit, 2016
Walter Denny
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Greek Kitchen, NYC
All of us who collect or enjoy the artistry of oriental carpets know that these works of art have often been subject to various myths, legends and dubious scholarship. From the “intentional flaw” to the “Gapylyk tribe,” stories from the marketplace –and on occasion, from the scholarly world itself –have long found currency in our world. In this illustrated lecture, Walter Denny will draw on his early experience as collector and later career as academic researcher to look at this received wisdom, which ranges from hilarious to just plain wrong. He will argue that in rugs, as in everything else, the search for truth is a necessary but imperfect process.
Walter B. Denny is Distinguished Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, specializing in the art of the Islamic world. From 1970 to 2000, he was Honorary Curator of Islamic Carpets at the Fogg Museum, and from 2007 to 2017 he served as Senior Consultant in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 1970, beginning his teaching career at UMass/Amherst in September of that year, and retiring in May 2023. His research interests include the art and architecture of the Ottoman Empire, Islamic carpets and textiles, and the thousand-year history of interaction between the Islamic world and Europe. Walter continues to consult and to give lectures on a variety of topics in the U.S. and abroad. He is currently Chair of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Textile Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Charles Grant Ellis Research Associate in Islamic carpets at The Textile Museum.