By Jane Curran | Monday, November 6, 2023
Art history undergraduates curated an exhibition at UMass Amherst about Professor Walter Denny’s groundbreaking research on Middle Eastern carpets and textiles. The exhibition “Treasured Knowledge: Walter Denny and the Woven World of Carpets” opened with a reception on Friday, October 20, 2023. It kicked off a symposium celebrating Professor Denny’s achievements and honoring him on his retirement. The show is on view in the Greenbaum gallery of Elm House in the UMass Commonwealth Honors College through Fall 2024.
The exhibition celebrated Professor Denny’s 53 years of teaching and service at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his incredible research on carpets of the Islamic world. Undergraduate Program Director Professor Margaret Vickery worked with a cohort of undergraduate students for two semesters to develop the show as part of an independent study through the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. Student contributors included: Meredith Boyle, Amelia Ceballos, Jane Curran, Marcela Pareja, Andersson Perry, Masha Pitel, Chelsea Staub, Ari Whittum, and Mary Zeng.
Students worked in teams to research the different steps of the carpet production process, aspects of carpet patterns, and Professor Denny’s scholarship. Students wrote several essays for a twenty-page catalog about the objects in the gallery. Objects on display included textile fragments, tools used to make the carpets and an entire small-scale loom made by a student. Professor Denny and Marilyn Denny of Amherst loaned many of the objects. An interview with Professor Denny conducted by the students is available for viewing via YouTube above.
The exhibition also displayed photographs of textile production taken by Professor Denny, who is a skilled photographer. His photographs, numbering in the tens of thousands, are accessible through the JSTOR database under the title “Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny: Islamic Art and Architecture Collection.”
