Weintz Art Lecture Series: Elizabeth Dospěl Williams

Made possible by the J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series Fund, this series invites distinguished art historians from diverse concentrations each quarter to speak and engage with our students and the Stanford community, enriching the culture of art history and appreciation on campus and beyond.

Marketing Late Antique Textile “Collages”

Hundreds of thousands of late antique Egyptian textiles are preserved in museum collections around the globe, many the result of what would today be considered illicit excavations in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. It is precisely because of their vast numbers and low valuations as individual works that such textiles are rarely assessed as fakes. Yet a group of fabrics depicting dark-skinned figures in racialized terms raises questions about the production of imitation Egyptian textiles for the modern art market and these objects’ lasting reverberations in collections, in exhibitions, and on the art market through the twentieth-century until today. Bringing together close technical analyses, archival research into the objects’ provenance history, and consideration of comparable visual sources, this paper situates non-authentic works as primary sources in the reception history and the historiography of Coptic and Byzantine art.

About the Speaker

Elizabeth Dospěl Williams is Penny Vinik Chair of Fashion, Textiles and Jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, responsible for global collections from ancient to contemporary. She was previously Curator of the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., where curated special exhibitions including Rich in Blessings: Women, Wealth, and the Late Antique Household (2023) and Woven Interiors: Furnishing Early Medieval Egypt (2019).

Dospěl Williams has authored numerous chapters and exhibition catalogue essays, with a focus on wearable arts, interior design, provenance history, and comparative art historical approaches. Her research is forthcoming or has appeared in Speculum, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, and The Textile Museum Journal. With Eiren Shea and Patricia Blessing, she recently co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1500 for the Cambridge Elements in the Global Middle Ages Series (2023). Dospěl Williams holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine and Islamic art history and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.