New york - Textiles as currency
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Four centuries of textiles from Asia, Europe and the Americas are the focus of a new exhibition that explores the world’s first truly global market — textiles.
“Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800,” which runs through January 5 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, features 134 works, including wall hangings, bed covers, tapestries, church vestments, pieces of seating furniture, costumes, paintings and drawings.
Amelia Peck, curator of American decorative arts at the museum, said the use of textiles as currency to buy other goods created the first truly global trade. The idea for the exhibit began when an 18th-century textile, once thought to be American and then attributed to English producers, turned out to have come from India.
For hundreds of years textiles were carried over land, but the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire along the Silk Road and the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 disrupted the paths. Europeans found sea routes to Southeast Asia and discovered exotic textiles along the way. “When European ships went to the Far East, they came back laden with textiles. Textiles were really a huge part of what was being moved around the globe,” Peck said. The exhibit includes textiles from China, India, Peru, Mexico, Iran, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, France and Britain.
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