Lectures in Art History: Sylvia Houghteling, Bryn Mawr College

“The Ecology of Ephemeral Dyes: Textile Colorants Beyond Colonial Trade Networks in Early Modern South and Southeast Asia”

This talk brings together poetry, dye recipes, textiles, and their representations in painting to explore the vivid but quickly fading pink and yellow dyestuffs that were used in early modern South Asia and maritime Southeast Asia. Documents from the period suggest the widespread use and importance of certain labile, unfixed dyes – safflower, turmeric, and saffron – that were treasured materials even if they were fleeting. While the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with the increasing European mercantile encroachment into the textile trade of the eastern Indian Ocean region, the objects and dye materials I will discuss evaded European economic control. This project also levels an early environmental critique of the practices of European colonialist commerce that sought to stabilize materials, monopolize and standardize commodity trades, and devalued things that were local and specific; things that were fragile in their perishability. In tracing the usages of dye materials that doubled as cooking ingredients, this study engages taste alongside the tactile, visual, and olfactory senses. And in foregrounding the history of a non-European exchange in perishable materials between coastal South Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, it realigns the prevailing histories of trade that place Europeans at the center to recover what were, by necessity of their materials and seasonal uses, regional and local exchanges. In these connections, we find meanings of celebration and healing, devotion and mourning that rarely surface otherwise.

Sylvia Houghteling, Associate Professor of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, specializes in early modern visual and material culture, focusing on the history of textiles, South Asian art and architecture, and the material legacies and ruptures of European colonialism. Houghteling’s first book, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022) examined the textiles crafted and collected across the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing how woven objects helped to shape the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia. The book received a College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant and won the 2023 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India also received the 2022 R.L. Shep Memorial Book Award from the Textile Society of America.  Houghteling received her Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University in 2015, where she received the Frances Blanshard Fellowship Fund Prize for her doctoral dissertation. She holds an A.B. in history and literature from Harvard University (2006), and an M.Phil. in history from the University of Cambridge (2007). Before entering the field of art history, Houghteling gained experience in weaving, textile dyeing, fashion design, felting, block-printing, and silk-painting. As someone who became interested in art through making it, Houghteling teaches and learns through conversations with contemporary practitioners and hands-on encounters with objects.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Carolina Asia Center.

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Image: Detail: Hunting coat, Satin, embroidered with silk, South Asia, ca. 1610-1630, ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS.18-1947