• Elena Phipps (Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance at UCLA, Los Angeles) : Cochineal Red: color from the Americas to the world

Cochineal red—the color from the Dactylopius coccus insect that originated in the Americas is one of the most important sources of red dye in the world. This lecture will discuss the research project to identify the presence of cochineal red in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to contextualize the history of the dye, its early use in Precolumbian ritual and textiles from Mexico and Peru, and trace the spread of the American dyestuff through global cultural interchange in the Early Modern Period following the Spanish arrival to the New World in the sixteenth century.

Suggested readings: 

Cardon, Dominique “Vermillion, Scarlet and Crimson Scale Insect Sources of Anthraquinones. In Natural Dyes: Sources, Tradition, Technology and Science. Archetype Press, London. 2007. pp 607-656.

Donkin, R. A. (1977). "Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus". Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. 67 (5): 1–84

Phipps, E.  Cochineal Red: the art history of a color. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/cochineal_red_the_art_history_of_a_color

Phipps, Elena and Shibayama, Nobuko, "Tracing Cochineal Through the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum" (2010). Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. 44. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/44

Wouters J. and Verhecken, A.,“The Coccid Insect Dyes: HPLC and Computerized Diode-Array Analysis of Dyed Yarns” Studies in Conservation 34 (1989), pp. 189-200.

• Laurence Douny (Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ) : Indigo Dyeing in West Africa - Fieldwork perspectives

References: 

Douny, L..,2019. ‘From pits to pots: indigo dyeing traditions of the Maransé of Burkina Faso’, Technology’s stories (Society for the History of Technology). https://www.technologystories.org/from-pits-to-pots/

Olivier Gosselain et Lucie Smolderen, « Les fantômes du Dendi », Techniques & Culture [En ligne], 65-66 | 2016, mis en ligne le 31 octobre 2018, consulté le 22 janvier 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/tc/8198 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/tc.8198

Gosselain, O., Smolderen, L., Brunfaut, V., Pinet, J., & Livingstone Smith, A. (2018). " Ethnographic Methods". In Two Thousand Years in Dendi, Northern Benin. Leiden, Niederlande: Brill. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004376694_009

Cardon, D. (2007). Natural dyes: Sources, tradition, technology and science. London: Archetype.