FRONTLINES
NEWS News  David Black’s latest weaving exhibition; a new Istanbul gallery for Mehmet Çetinkaya; the November auction at Rippon Boswell Wiesbaden; Maastrict 2012; the sad loss of Mary Hunt Kahlenberg and Richard Morant
FAIRS The return of antique rugs to Domotex Hannover – a preview of the antique carpets that will be showing at the fair in January 2012
FEATURES
ISLAMIC ART RETURNS TO THE MET ‘Sheila Canby, Sheila Blair & Jonathan Bloom, Deniz Beyazit, Roger Pratt, DeWitt Mallary, Julia Bailey, William Robinson, Walter B. Denny The Scholars’ View  Blair & Bloom review the Met’s $50-million Islamic gallery renovation The Making of a Collection  The current Met exhibition devoted to donors to the collection From the Outside Looking in  First impressions of the Met’s new Islamic galleries Behind the Scenes  How the galleries were created with carpets and textiles in mind
IMPERIAL PUZZLE Sixteenth-Century Persian Spiral Vine Carpets with Animals Christine Klose A posthumous tribute to one of the most prolific independent carpet scholars of her generation – we present Dr Klose’s final ICOC paper, given in Istanbul in 2007, in which she reconstructs the extent of a highly regarded design type of early Safavid ‘Hunting’ carpets
THE TREE OF LIFE
Textiles and Carpets in the Context of Nature Worship             Susan Day Examining the extensive use of tree imagery in carpets and textiles. An abridged and updated version of ‘The Tree of Life: a Universal Symbol’, ?rst presented by the author at ICOC IX in Milan in 1999, and published in 2001 in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies VI
HIGH LIGHT Helmut F. Neumann A report on the collections of the Abegg Foundation in Riggisberg, Switzerland, which reopened its doors on a new permanent exhibition in autumn 2011 after extensive modernisation
TO THE HEART OF ISLAM Venetia Porter With reference to the British Museum’s upcoming exhibition ‘Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam’ the curator examines the textiles of Mecca and Medina
CONTEXT
EXHIBITIONS ‘Chinese Weaving: Antique Textile Art: XVth-XIX Century’ at the Moshe Tabibnia Gallery in Milan; The Textile Museum Washington’s Kuba cloth and basketry exhibition ‘Weaving Abstraction’; more baskets, this time Aboriginal, at the British Museum, London; Christian Erber reviews Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent ‘Gifts of the Sultan’ show; Jonathan Hope’s collection of batiks and trade textiles in Edinburgh; Central Asian rugs at David Sorgato’s gallery in Milan; Anatolian kilims at San Francisco’s De Young Museum and Tom Cole’s Marin County gallery; review of the San Francisco Antique Rugs and Textiles Show; the top pieces from Asian Art in London
CALENDAR Auctions, exhibitions, fairs and conferences worldwide
AUCTION PRICE GUIDE Recent sales in Europe and the USA
BOOKS Turkmen Carpets. Masterpieces of Steppe Art. The Hoffmeister Collection by Elena Tsareva, reviewed by Michael Rothberg; Stephen Cohen looks at Rapture. The Art of Indian Textiles by Rahul Jain; Michael Buddeberg on Tom Cole’s Patterns of Life: The Art of Tibetan Carpets
SPECIAL REPORT An in-depth look by Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar at leading edge rug production in Afghanistan and the entrepreneurial designers who are changing the face of traditional weaving
PARTING SHOTS From San Francisco, New York, Berlin, London and Washington
LAST PAGE An inscribed Tiberias tiraz reed prayer mat from the Metropolitan Museum