Weaving stories: art and textiles

Mary Schoeser is a freelance writer and curator, who has contributed to the dialogue surrounding contemporary textile arts practice. She has authored essays on leading UK artists such as Kaffe Fassett, Diana Harrison, Julia Griffiths Jones, Alice Kettle, Hillu Liebelt, Deirdre Nelson, Deepa Panchamia, Norma Starszakowna and Michael Brennand Wood. With co-curator Dennis Nothdruft she has developed an exhibition on Orla Kiely for the Fashion & Textile Museum (May 2018) and Tricia Guild (February 2019). With Dilys Blum at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she produced the exhibition and book, Off the Wall: American Art to Wear (Nov. 2019). In this – as well as in books such as Silk (Yale University Press, 2007), Rozanne Hawksley: Offerings (Ruthin Craft Centre and Lund Humphries, 2009) and Textiles: The art of mankind (Thames & Hudson, 2012 and 2013) – she draws upon her work as an historian to inform an understanding of leading-edge developments. She is affiliated with the Victoria and Albert Museum as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, and is Patron of the School of Textiles, Coggeshall, and the Bernat Klein Foundation, for which she edited their recently-published book, Bernat Klein.

Professor Evelyn Welch is Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Bristol. She graduated from Harvard University, receiving her PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. She was previously Senior Vice-President for Service, People & Planning at King’s College London, and had been Vice-President (Arts and Sciences) and Provost (Arts and Sciences). As Professor of Renaissance Studies, she has led major research programmes including The Material Renaissance, and Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images. She recently completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for a project on Renaissance Skin and has authored numerous books, including Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800 (OUP 2017), and Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale 2005), winning the Wolfson Prize for History.

Professor Sussan Babaie teaches at The Courtauld, University of London. She has curated exhibitions on Persian and Islamic arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at Harvard, Smith College, and Michigan university museums, and at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. She is the author of Isfahan and Its Palaces, co-author of Persian Kingship and Architecture, Shirin Neshat, Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art, and Geometry and Art in the Modern Middle East.

Dr Flavia Frigeri is an art historian, lecturer, and ‘Chanel Curator for the Collection’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Previously she was ‘Curator, International Art’ at Tate Modern, where she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015) and was responsible for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013) and Ruins in Reverse (2013). She is the author of Pop Art and Women Artists both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series and the co-editor of a volume of collected essays, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021).

Raina Lampkins-Fielder is a curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She has worked for over 20 years in museums and cultural institutions as a curator and cultural programmer, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Mona Bismarck American Center in Paris, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.