Nelly Sethna and the Reception of Textiles between the United States and India

Abstract

Using the Indian textile artist Nelly Sethna’s work at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the late 1950s as a starting point, this article excavates little-known aspects of the Indian and United States art worlds centered around textiles. It elaborates contemporary writings on Sethna’s practice to demonstrate how questions of aesthetics, materiality, functionality, identity, and consumption filtered into the discourse on her rugs, room dividers, wall hangings, and upholstery fabrics. The article suggests that Sethna’s works created tensions among categories such as fine art, crafts, and design. Yet, whereas her work in Michigan was received within a vibrant market for designer textiles among affluent buyers, Bombay (now Mumbai), the city to which Sethna returned after Cranbrook, was a nascent milieu for textiles as design and art objects. At Bombay galleries where her textiles were consistently displayed, Sethna’s works became attached to ideas about consumer taste, national identity, and the overlaps between fine and applied art. By focusing on an artist who has received substantially less attention in comparison to her contemporaries such as the mostly-male Bombay Progressives, the article highlights the ascendancy of the textile arts and the criteria by which they were evaluated in postcolonial India.