Chiara Buss
L'identità di una collezione: come nascono i musei – Collecting Textiles
LECTURE
21 September 2012
FAR – Villa Sucota
Chiara Buss graduated in art history, with an M. A. in paleography, and in the mid-seventies, she turned to research in textile history. She has since published numerous studies on the subject, while dedicating a large part of her activity to planning and curating exhibitions on textile and fashion history in Europe, the USA, and Japan. For the past decade, she has been teaching textile history at Università Cattolica, in Milano and at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, and since 2004 she is a member of the Directing Council of the Centre International d'Etude des Tissus Anciens (CIETA) in Lyon. She planned the first two multimedia catalogues of textile collections in Italy: that of Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan (1995), which brought her the "Compasso d'oro" award in 1996, and that of the Textile Museum of the Antonio Ratti Foundation in Como (1998).
In 1988, she took on the studying and cataloguing of the Antonio Ratti textile collection that in 1998 became the Textile Museum of the Ratti Foundation in Como, which she directed until 2006.
Since 2007, she has been the Director of the PSL Project (Silk Production in Lombardy, from the 15th to the 20th Century) in collaboration with twelve international institutions. Within this project, she has curated the first two exhibitions, and related publications: Silk Gold Crimson. Secrets and Technology at the Visconti and Sforza Courts (2009) and Silk Gold Incarnadine. Luxury and Devotion in Lombardy under Spanish Rule (2011).