Vakas, (priest’s collar) from the Armenian Museum of America
By Aram Arkun
Armenian Mirror-Spectator
October 5, 2021
The Aidekman Arts Center of the Tufts University Art Galleries presents an exhibition of Armenian church textiles from August 5 to December 5 called Connecting Threads / Survivor Objects. It is a small but varied collection of 11 embroidered, block printed, and painted objects that are rare surviving legacies of Armenian culture. The exhibition was organized by Christina Maranci, Arthur H. Dadian and Ara T. Oztemel Professor of Armenian Art and Architecture, and Chiara Pidatella, Research Curator.
Dr. Maranci related the origins of the exhibit: “Basically it came about by me poking around through the website of the Armenian Museum of America and also the Museum of Fine Arts and noticing the wealth of liturgical textiles. I thought it would be a nice way to exhibit Armenian art by looking at textiles because of the ways in which textiles speak to the early modern experience. I talked about it with Dina Deitsch, the director of the art galleries. That is how it came about and it seemed like a really great opportunity to teach.”
The materials for the exhibition emerged from the work conducted in Maranci’s spring 2021 seminar, The Threads of Survival, which included 10 undergraduate and graduate students. She said, “My intention was never for this to be a large show. It was always to be something that was the product of student research. The crucial thing actually was taking objects that had been almost completely unstudied, barely catalogued, and to do deep research on them. Each student was assigned a single object, and had a chance to do that kind of careful work with a single object over the course of a semester.”
Deitsch said, “For us as an academic art space, what was exciting was the collaboration that we were hoping to do with Christina and Chiara, and the fact that the students’ scholarship was able to have a physical realization in an exhibition. I think it was a wonderful collaboration between the Armenian Museum of America and eventually the Museum of Fine Arts.”
Click here to read the full article:
https://mirrorspectator.com/2021/10/05/armenian-church-textiles-displayed-at-tufts-university/