IMAGE DETAILS

Half-silk ikat panel, Uzbekistan, late 19th or early 20th century. The Textile Museum, Washington DC, Megalli Collection, 2009.17.2

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30 July 2010

‘Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats’ opens at The Textile Museum, Washington DC in October 2010 with a substantial selection from the generous gift of 185 Central Asian ikats by Murad Megalli. Here the Turkish collector offers a personal introduction to the collection in his own words.

My interest in textiles dates back to the late 1980s when, as a young banker recently transferred from New York to Istanbul, I was introduced to the late Josephine Powell. Walking into her kilim-strewn Sisli apartment was the beginning of a twenty-year friendship, over the course of which I was introduced to many other people with an enthusiastic interest in kilims, rugs and other textiles, among them Renata and Harald Böhmer.

In the early days, Josephine and I spent countless dinners at the Böhmer’s house looking at and discussing kilims, while for many years I would march down to the bazaar every week, where every stall was turned over, every lead followed, and many dealers discovered. Everything found on these outings made its way back to Josephine’s living room where it was unfolded, discussed, and analysed at length. This was all part of my informal education on nomadic Turkish weavings.

So where did ikats come in? Walking through the bazaars of Peshawar in Pakistan one day in the late 1980s, I looked up and saw something I had never seen before that instantly grabbed me. My companions and I soon found ourselves in the back of a minivan careering through narrow alleyways on our way to an unknown destination where we were told they had “the good stuff.” We ended up buying a few pieces that I later understood to be average, and by no means unique.

Ikats were forgotten upon my return to Istanbul until one day in the early 1990s when Josephine and I were asked to meet a dealer with something to show us, the like of which had not been seen in the Turkish bazaar for many years. More than twenty ikat chapans were laid out in front of us. We were on to something, but we did not know the extent. Both of us were only learning about ikats and had no idea of the range and diversity of designs. At that point Pip Rau’s slim catalogue, published in 1988, was the only available source material, and we studied it in painstaking detail, while relying on our instinct for colour, developed through looking at kilims and other textiles.

Years of invitations followed to homes in remote areas of Istanbul where magnificent textiles were presented as we sipped endless cups of tea and haggled over prices. Money was scarce, so we pooled our resources and those of our friends. Competition was fierce: it was not unknown for us to duck behind parked cars as we left homes to avoid being seen by other buyers who were just arriving. I am sure other collectors have regrets about the pieces they missed, and so did we. As our interest grew, our hunt for Central Asian ikats expanded to various cities in the Middle East, Europe, and even to London and New York.

My interest in ikats coincided with my work taking me into Central Asia and a developing interest in Uzbekistan and its history. Bukhara, for me, linked ikat textiles as objects to their cultural context. Collecting, for me, was not only about their beauty, but also their history, the people who made them, and the adventure of discovering them one piece at a time.

Eventually, in 2005, I decided that the ikats had spent enough time in a closet and under my bed, and that it was time to ensure they were available to a wider audience. I discussed the gift with number of institutions before coming to the conclusion that The Textile Museum was the ikats’ natural home. The Museum in its turn was very gracious in its response, accepting the gift and espousing a vision for the future of the collection that was entirely consistent with my own.

Colors of the Oasis, with essays by Feza Çakmut, Mary Dusenbury, Kate Fitz Gibbon, Andrew Hale, Sumru Belger Krody, Sayera Makhkamova and Susan Meller, as well as more than a hundred colour plates and a full catalogue of the 185 ikat textiles in the Murad Megalli Gift, will be published in October 2010 to accompany the exhibition ‘Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats’.

Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats

The Textile Museum, 2320 S Street NW. Washington DC, USA

16 October 2010 – 13 March 2011