Friends of Textiles Presents Kashmir Shawls from Antiquity to High Fashion April 10

MELBOURNE, FLA.— Florida Institute of Technology’s Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts will host Natalia Nekrassova of the Textile Museum of Canada (TMC) in the next Friends of Textiles Lecture Series April 10. The lecture is at 6 p.m. in the Denius Student Center’s Hartley Room on campus; a reception starts at 5:15.

Nekrassova, TMC curator of collections and research, will discussher 2009 exhibition, “Fashionably Wrapped: The Influence of Kashmir Shawls.” She will trace the origins of the shawl from the noble courts of India, where finely woven pieces were made and worn for several centuries, to the high-fashion market in Europe, where shawls were desired for their unusual beauty and exquisite weaving.

At the TMC, Nekrassova’s research and exhibition interests are in the traditional textiles of Central Asia and the Middle East. Through a series of exhibitions, she made historic and contemporary textiles from Asia and North Africa available to the public within the rich context of the traditional cultures of the regions. She has catalogued the TMC’s collection of over 12,000 artifacts for global access online. Before joining the TMC in 2002, Nekrassova was the Keeper of Rugs and Decorative Art Collections at the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow.

With 30 years experience as a museum curator, her many assignments include exhibitions of traditional art and textiles in Moscow and abroad, in collaboration with museums in Europe and Asia. For more than 20 years, she organized and participated in yearly field trips to Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus for research and acquisition of artifacts for the Museum’s collection. She was previously an expert and consultant on Oriental rugs for the Russian Ministry of Culture, and lectured on Islamic art at the Islamic University in Moscow.

Individual tickets for the lecture cost $10 each for the general public and are free to Friends of Textiles members and full-time students. For more information, call the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts at (321) 674-8313 or visit http://textiles.fit.edu.