Readings on Textiles: From 75 Years of Marg | IIC Seminar, New Delhi | August 22, 2024

Abigail McGowan is Professor of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Vermont, USA. An historian of South Asian material culture in the late colonial period, she has published widely on craft development, the gendered politics of consumption, design history, textiles, domesticity, housing, retail, and domestic furnishings in India. Her current book projects explore how changing ideas about home and domestic space have shaped the city of Bombay, and how the iconic Bombay firm Kamdar Ltd. traces a history of mid-century interior design in India.
Mayank Mansingh Kaul is a New Delhi-based writer and curator with a focus on post-independence histories of textiles, design and fashion in India. He is a graduate in textile design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Exhibitions that he has curated include The Idea of Fashion (Khoj International Artists’ Residency, New Delhi, 2011), Fracture: Indian Textiles, New Conversations (Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, 2015), Gold: The Art of Zari (Bikaner House, New Delhi, 2017), 25 Years of Abraham & Thakore (New Delhi, 2017), Crossroads: Textile Journeys with Ritu Kumar (India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 2018), New Traditions: Influences & Inspirations in Indian Textiles, 1947-2017 (Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, 2018), Meanings, Metaphor - Handspun and Handwoven in the 21st Century (Chirala, Coimbatore, Bangalore, 2018-19) and Red Lilies, Water Birds - The Saree in NIne Stories (Anegundi-Hampi, 2022). Kaul is the editor of Take on Art Design (2012), Cloth and India: Towards Recent Histories, 1947-2015 (Marg, 2016), Baluchari: Tradition and Beyond (2016) and Take on Art Fashion, which looks at a century of Indian fashion through the narrative of personal histories (2019). He is Consulting Editor, Architectural Digest India, and a member of the Advisory Council on Arts & Culture (South Asia) at the Asia Society.