Asian Art Museum of San Francisco to Showcase Velvet Collection

February 25, 2015  by in Designer Weekly   

The “Woven Luxuries: Indian, Persian and Turkish Velvets from the Indictor Collection” exhibit will run March 13 until Nov. 1 at the museum.

More than just practical for clothing and furnishings, silk velvets during the period symbolized sophisticated taste and cultural power. 

Delicate and sensuous, requiring high-quality materials and specialized expertise, velvets were made in more limited quantities than other types of fine textiles. Velvets were admired and traded in elite circles. Gaining popularity across the world from the 15th century, velvets were the textiles par excellence at the royal courts of Mughal India, Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey. 

Exhibition highlights include two complete 17th-century velvets from India and Iran, each measuring nearly 6 by 4 feet and preserving not only their design elements but also their vibrant colors. The exhibition also features a fragmentary Mughal carpet border, whose high quality of artistry and materials suggests that it would have been made for a royal patron. On public display for the first time is a large Ottoman textile featuring a motif associated with good luck. 

The 10 velvets in this exhibition (six Mughal, three Safavid, and one Ottoman) offer a window into the world of elite Islamic culture of the time. Inherently vulnerable to deterioration like most luxury textiles, well-preserved velvets like these are scarce. Drawn from the private collection of Rina and Norman Indictor in New York, the textiles in this exhibition retain much of their visual impact.