Students in Professor Nachiket Chanchani's HISTART 505: Himalayas: An Aesthetic Exploration visited the Research Museums Center, where they had the opportunity to spend time with UMMAA's collection of Himalayan art collected by Walter Koelz. (Learn more here.) In the photo above, the class is looking at a striped wool shawl collected in Delhi, thought to have been woven around 1825. The botehs and floral stripes are meant to remind the viewer of the well-ordered Mughal pleasure gardens of India.
From 1932 to 1934, Koelz led a scientific collecting expedition through northern India and Western Tibet. Koelz's diary for this expedition has been published by UMMAA Press in the book The Himalayan Journey of Walter N. Koelz: The University of Michigan Himalayan Expedition, 1932-34, by Carla M. Sinopoli (read it here). Descriptions and photographs of the Kashmiri shawls collected by Koelz have been published in another UMMAA Press book, Wrapped in Beauty: The Koelz Collection of Kashmiri Shawls, by Grace Beardsley in collaboration with Carla M. Sinopoli (read it here).
