Magic carpets...
Ben Barnhart photo
The "Dynamo Denny" tag is likely to be with him for awhile: In March, UMass professor WALTER DENNY was given that soubriquet by The New Yorker magazine, which called him "one of the only serious Islamic-art historians who will go near the rug world." Actually, as evidenced by this photograph in his Amherst home, Denny never gets far from the rug world.
In any case, when a senior advisor was needed for this winter's "Palace of Gold and Light: Treasures from the Topkapi, Istanbul" at the Corcoran Gallery, it was to Denny that its organizers turned. The peripatetic Islamicist logged hundreds of hours on behalf of the Palace Arts Foundation of Washington: traveling to Istanbul, negotiating with Turkish authorities, working with designers and publicists, editing the catalog, writing labels and wall texts and a film script—"Everything but sweep the floors," Denny told The Campus Chronicle in March.
In May, a grant from the foundation allowed Denny and fellow Islamicist and history chair MARY WILSON to take twenty-one of their students to Washington to see the exhibition of fifteenth and sixteenth century Ottoman art, much of which had never before left Turkey. Since her class covers the period from 1500 to the present day, Wilson said the exhibition "was like a review of the first part of the course" for her students. "It sewed it all up for them," she said.
