Archaeological Textile Studies Course – space for 2 additional students at this time

Posted on by

California Institute for Peruvian Studies comes to Bryn Mawr College

Join us for the CIPS Archaeological Textile Course this summer! This year we are offering a course centered on the tools and techniques employed in the analysis of archaeological textile materials of ancient Peru and introduce students to the archaeology of the Andes.

Students will learn to identify, analyze and document the features of ancient textiles (fiber, spin and ply structure, weave structure, iconography, and various other techniques) by examining archaeological textiles from various sites in Peru from the impressive Bryn Mawr collection, and by learning how to spin and weave the Andean way. The course includes lectures on the art and archaeology of pre-Columbian Andean cultures, guest lectures by archaeologists and fiber artists, and field trips to local museums.

This course is suited to art and archaeology students, museum professionals and textile enthusiasts of any age.

Bryn Mawr: June 3rd-8th (one week)

Course Fees: $1200 for residential students, $750 for day students

Cost includes lodging on Bryn Mawr’s campus (double occupancy) for residential students, all meals (group meals and lunch for day students), workbook and course supplies, and transportation and museum admission for all excursions. Cost does not include transportation to and from Bryn Mawr, meals taken away from the group, personal expenses, alcoholic beverages, or insurance.

For more information, contact Dr. Anne Tiballi at cipstextiles@gmail.com

Need Images?

Posted on by

Looking for images of art or artifacts? Tri-college staff, faculty and students please consider using our TriArte database to get images from the college’s special collections holdings. Go to triarte.brynmawr.edu and browse collections by searching or perhaps selecting featured collections to get you started. When you find images you like, simply right click on them and save them to your computer.  Feel free to use them! Some objects even have rotating .mov files attached, and coming soon, we will also begin to add zoomified images, so you’ll be able to see collections objects up-close and personal.

If you do not have a tri-college login, we do plan on making this resource available outside the tri-college community by the end of 2012 . . . so keep checking back and we will make another post when the site goes live on the web.

Guest instructor Anne Tiballi, PhD of the California Institute for Peruvian Studies comes to Bryn Mawr College Special Collections

Posted on by

Students in an Anthropology class taught by Dr. Richard Davis, recently had the opportunity of taking a class with guest instructor Anne Tiballi, PhD, Director of Archaeological Textile Studies at the California Institute for Peruvian Studies.

The students are pictured here looking at Peruvian textiles held in Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College. This included a variety of techniques, culture groups and materials from different time periods. Some of the materials displayed were from the Middle Horizon period and weaving techniques include tapestry, double cloth and brocade out of camelid and cotton fibers.

The culture groups represented included Nasca and Huari. Here are a few more close up examples of what we have in the collection….

Wari Tie-Dyed Textile Fragment with Diamond Pattern, ca. 600 – ca. 1000, Middle Horizon, Cotton fiber

Camelid wool. Discontinuous warp and wefts joined along scaffolding

Three pieces of cloth woven together together; then taken apart for dying and put back together along header chord. Two complete pieces finished on 4 sides; yellow cloth tie dyed green or red with a pattern of diamonds. South coast, middle horizon period.
Gift of Ward M. Canaday and Mariam Coffin Canaday, Class of 1906, 2000.3.50.a

 

 

Peruvian Tapestry Fragment with Repeating Feather Pattern
Colonial
Cotton and camelid fiber

Very fine yarns- pattern of feathers woven, joined by very fine sewing- two sections–red background with yellow, white, and brown feathers; brown background with yellow, white, and red feathers. Brown sewn edge on one side where another section of
cloth was joined. Colonial, colors look Inca, possibly a tunic with the side binding of the tunic, feather imagery, cotton warp, excentric weft, selvedge chained off and bound differently in some areas. Spectacular piece. There are eccentric wefts making this a tapestry. The eccentric wefts contribute to the contour of the feathers. The weave density of the wefts changes. Warp and weft are camelid wool.

Gift of Ward M. Canaday and Mariam Coffin Canaday, Class of 1906,  2000.3.20.a

Peruvian Textile with Staff God and Bird Figures

200 – 1000, Probably Middle Horizon or earlier
Camelid and cotton

Staff god with bird figures. Geometric patterns in white, gold, red, blue, and green camelid yarns. Cotton warp. Left side is finished, others are not.
Interlocking tapestry . Probably made as a tab to hand down from a
tunic, like a fringe. Has eccentric wefts around the eyes. Single and paired warps contribute to the compression of the fabric. Warps are cotton, wefts are wool. Made on the coast because it uses both
cotton and wool.

Gift of Ann L. Pfeiffer-Murphy, 2007.1.18

Wari (Huari) Tunic Fragment with Geometric Design and Camelid Imagery

ca. 600 – ca. 1000, Middle Horizon
Camelid fiber

Fine geometric design in browns and golds. The design includes the eye  and mouth of a Llama (or camelid)  along the edges of the fragment. Remnants of red selvage binding. Very fine tapestry (high status). Wari (Huari). Wool (camelid). Dovetail tapestry joins between the colored areas. There are holes along the edge where the binding used to be, but was removed. The binding was red and yellow.

Gift of Ward M. Canaday and Mariam Coffin Canaday, Class of 1906, 2000.3.174

Peruvian Textile Fragment with Human Figure Imagery

Cotton and camelid fiber

Slit weave tapestry fragment with three repeating alien-like figures (possibly marine animal?, possibly squid). Background is gold with figures in brown, red, and black. Sewn (lined) to balanced plain
weave blocking of brown cotton on four edges. Peruvian textile is
all wool. Lining is not Peruvian. Originally part of a belt or head
wrapping.

Gift of Ward M. Canaday and Mariam Coffin Canaday, Class of 1906
2000.3.17.a

 

Peruvian Knitted Ornament Depicting a Human Head

ca. 200 – 600
Early Intermediate, Camelid fiber

Needle knitted (Cross-knit looping) face. Fragment of fringe. Design in pink, red, brown, and white yarns.

Gift of Ward M. Canaday and Mariam Coffin Canaday, Class of 1906, 2000.3.61.a

 

Admitted Students visit Bryn Mawr College Special Collections

Posted on by

Bryn Mawr College Special Collections is proud to be part of the community offering campus wide activities for admitted students who will begin their Mawter lives in the Fall. Over the past few weeks we have welcomed dozens of students and their families into the Special Collections Reading Room on the Second Floor of Canaday Library.

As part of the active program of events at Bryn Mawr College, Special Collections staff and student workers spoke with admitted students and their families about the holdings we have spanning the College Archives, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection and the Art and Artifacts Collection.

Treasures on show include old scrapbooks from students in the early twentieth century, illuminated manuscripts of Chaucer’s collected works, first editions of novels by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Asian and African art. These are a small selection of the wonderful pieces we have in our collections, and if you would like to know more about our holdings visit the Special Collections website here

If you have not yet visited with your family, this is the last week of our admitted students activities so please make sure you come along!

 

All images courtesy of Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager, Art and Artifact Collections

Students with objects

Posted on by

It was a very busy week in Special Collections! Four separate classes worked with selected objects from the Art and Artifact collections (over 100 objects in all), we hosted several graduate students and independent researchers pursuing various investigations, and whenever we had a chance to look across the offices, we noted that Rare Books and Manuscripts was also quite busy with faculty, student, and outside researchers.

Professors Hertel and Meyer and graduate students discuss late 19th-century photographs from the collection

Graduate students in Professor Hertel’s Vienna seminar discussing photographs from the collection

To top it all off, we participated in the first of three campus-wide admitted student events on Friday, introducing several dozen potential members of the class of 2016 to Bryn Mawr’s collections and the people who work with them.

Also on Friday, weaving her way through students and staff, University of Michigan Professor Artemis Leontis–fresh from her “Greek Dress and the Embodied Archaeology of Eva Palmer Sikelianos” lecture the previous evening–pored over materials from the college Archives as part of her ongoing research into the life and work of this fascinating woman.

Colors of Greece: The Art and Archaeology of Georg von Peschke

Posted on by

We’ve spent the past few days installing Colors of Greece: The Art and Archaeology of Georg von Peschke: reconfiguring walls, painting the gallery, producing labels, and beginning to unwrap, check, and place the artworks.

Brian Wallace, Curator/Academic Liason for Art and Artifacts working with Kostis Kourelis, Exhibition Curator and Steve Tucker, Exhibition Designer

This morning, our guest curator Kostis Kourelis took a break from working with designer Steve Tucker and curator Brian Wallace to reflect on the experience of seeing years of research take the form of an exhibition.

Kourelis noted the advantages accruing to him, as a scholar, arising from the opportunity he has had to view Peschke’s artwork in this new context, just a few short weeks after the exhibition, presented in a different arrangement, closed at Franklin & Marshall College. “Links between the works—thematic, narrative, and formal connections—are so clearly articulated in the exhibition that new subjects—the cultural role of architecture, for example—have presented themselves to me as important topics for future research.”

Kourelis also made mention of the way in which the exhibition links the history and culture of Bryn Mawr to artistic, intellectual, and political developments in the world. Peschke’s connection with Bryn Mawr archaeologists, so well documented in the exhibition, is a kind of scaffolding onto which current students can bring together their knowledge of college and world.

Exhibition Designer Steve Tucker Installing Text

 

Alix Smith: States of Union

Posted on by


ON VIEW NOW

Please be sure to stop by to see the six works by New York artist Alix Smith in Carpenter Library (B Level).

Alix will give a public lecture on her recent photographic series States of Union in Carpenter 21 on March 15 at 4pm.

Support for this program comes from the Center for Visual Culture, The Pensby Center, the Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the Student Art Club.

Win a 2GB Thumb Drive

Posted on by

The first Bryn Mawr College student to email the correct answer to the following questions to mweldon@brynmawr.edu will win a thumb drive.

Tell me the title, artist, and creation date for the object in the art and artifacts collection with the number X.205