Meeting Announcement:

The Kurdish Carpet Tradition

with

Jim Burns

at

The Burke Room, The Burke Museum

University of Washington Campus

Friday, January 30^th, 2004, 7:00 PM

The Kurdish people have been master weavers for centuries. However, because they have been a minority culture spread across a wide range of political boundaries, rug scholars have paid little attention to their weavings as a comprehensive whole. As a result, in most books about rug weaving published over the last 50 years, one can find Kurdish rugs in the chapters on Turkey, Persia, and the Caucuses, but rarely have they been discussed as a cohesive group.

Jim Burns is a Seattle native, lawyer, and author, and he has been a collector of antique rugs and textiles for over 40 years. His most recent book, Antique Rugs of Kurdistan – A Historical Legacy of Woven Art, is the most comprehensive work published on Kurdish weaving. In this book, he focuses on the weaving of the Kurds in Kurdistan, which is roughly defined by the range of the Zagros mountains, extending through Persia, Iraq, and Armenia into Western Turkey, and also includes an important enclave in Turkmenistan.

In this lecture, which will be illustrated entirely by rugs from Jim Burns’s collection, Jim Burns will discuss some of the design and structural features that have defined Kurdish weavings across many centuries, regions and styles. Which color combinations are almost exclusively used by Kurds? What weaving techniques? How did this cohesive tradition persist through centuries of migration, political oppression, and cultural intermingling? Come and learn about this important weaving tradition, which, until recently, has been little studied and poorly understood.

Meeting Schedule:

7:00 Mix and mingle. Announcements.

7:15 Jim Burns – “The Kurdish Carpet Tradition”

8:15 Show and tell – if you wish, please bring an interesting textile you’d like to share with the group. A Kurdish weaving would be particularly appropriate.

Please note: This meeting is free to all members, $5.00 at the door for guests. As always, all are welcome.

Meeting Location:

The Burke Museum is located at the Northwest corner of the University of Washington campus, near the corner of 17^th Avenue NE and NE 45^th Street. The Burke Room is on the left side of the lobby as you enter off of 17^th. Parking is available in the lot just South of the Burke Museum, or on the street in the University District.