Asian Art and History

Lecture

Asian Art and History They Came to Trade Illustrating Cosmopolitanism in South India, c. 1610

Joan Cummins, Ph.D., Bernard Selz Senior Curator of Asian Art, Brooklyn Museum

India’s southeastern “Coromandel” coast was home to busy port cities for centuries. A painted cotton wall hanging from the region, made around 1610 and now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, offers a rare visual document of the diverse merchant populations of these trade hubs. More than 200 figures are illustrated on this massive textile. Among these are European, East African, Middle Eastern, Thai and Indonesian men and women, along with the local Indian elites, and Adivasis, the tribal people who populated remote areas of the subcontinent’s interior. Delving into the wealth of information provided by this fascinating example of non-Western ethnography, this talk will look at the complexity of Indian Ocean trade in the early 17th century.

This presentation is part of the Asian Art and History series.

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Joan Cummins

Joan Cummins

Joan Cummins, Ph.D., is the Lisa and Bernard Selz Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Brooklyn Museum. A specialist in the arts of India, Cummins oversees a much broader collection of Asian art and has most recently curated the exhibition Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (featuring Takashi Murakami). She is the author of Indian Painting: From Cave Temples to the Colonial Period (Boston, 2006), Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior (Nashville, 2011) and Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations (2018). Before she arrived at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007, she served as assistant curator of Indian, Southeast Asian and Himalayan art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received a doctorate in art history and archaeology from Columbia University.