Wednesday, November 10, 2021 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Speaker: Vishal Khandelwal
This talk focuses on the work of textile artists Nelly Sethna (1932-1992) and Helena Perheentupa (1929-2019), who were affiliated with postcolonial India’s first and most innovative design training academy, the National Institute of Design (NID), established in 1961 in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan between 1958 and 1960, Sethna and Perheentupa inaugurated the NID textiles program in 1968. The talk first elaborates the transnational context within which Sethna and Perheentupa conceived their textiles. It then analyzes their work in Indian villages to highlight the intersection between rural crafts economies and urban academic knowledge, suggesting that conceiving forms, making crafts, and imparting skills overlapped with cross-cultural exchanges in design and management education during the mid-to-late-twentieth century, leading to the configuration of the designer as a manager and mediator in postcolonial India.
Image Title: “Rug design by Helena Perheentupa being woven on a loom at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, c.1960. Source: Cranbrook Academy of Art publicity brochure, 1963-64.”
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