A History of The ICOC
In 1976 the first international conference on Oriental carpets (during London's Festival
of Islam) was expected to attract around a hundred participants. Robert Pinner writes: " ...it was decided
to form a small committee, book a university lecture room to hold that number, send out invitations to some twenty
or so lecturers and advertise the dates to potential participants. Six months later, having twice changed the venue,
the conference opened with five hundred people overfilling the Jeannette Cochran Theatre, and emergency half-day
bus tours arranged in the hope of tempting enough people away from the theatre to avoid breaking its fire regulations."
Subsequent conferences have been held in:
Munich in 1978; Washington DC in 1980; London in 1983; Vienna & Budapest in 1986; San Francisco in 1990; Hamburg
& Berlin in 1993, Philadelphia in 1996, Milan in 1999. ICOC has also sponsored regional conferences in Baku,
Istanbul, Leningrad, Marrakech and Tehran, each accompanied by memorable exhibitions.
Each international conference since 1986 has featured between six and eight exhibitions,
many of which have become landmarks in the field of carpet and textile art. Probably the most notable are "The
Eastern Carpet in the Western World" & "Carpet Magic" (London 1983), "Orient Stars"
(Hamburg 1993), and "Studies in Colour and Geometry: Turkish Pile Carpets from the Christopher Alexander Collection"
& "Anatolian Kilims: The McCoy Jones Collection" (San Francisco, 1990). As well as exhibitions from
museum collections worldwide, ICOC exhibitions have always featured the collections of "local" collectors,
such as "Oriental Rugs from Atlantic Collections" (Philadelphia 1996). In addition, since 1986, the conference
has hosted an ever more successful Dealers' Fair.
An international conference exists on many levels. As a forum for academic papers, it also
serves as a godfather to research. Publication plays an essential role in this task not only for the text of papers
but also of ICOC exhibitions for which illustrated catalogues provide a permanent record of otherwise ephemeral
spectacles. The papers presented at the conference were, until 1983, published in HALI (The International Magazine
of Antique Carpet & Textile Art), but since then have been published in Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies
(OCTS), with ICOC taking over the publication of the papers in 1993. Exhibition catalogues have been published
by museums and by ICOC, and often become important additions to the literature in their own right.
Equally important, however, is the conferences role as a meeting place. Each ICOC is an academic
and social event. It is an occasion for renewing old friendships and rivalries and for creating new ones, for putting
faces to familiar names, for discussing the latest fashions in rugs and theories, for being instructed and entertained,
bored and stimulated, by the latest gossip about rugs and rug people. It is a world of its own but a very accessible
one. It is one of the main strengths of the international conference that the majority of its presentations are
easily understood by the newcomer to oriental carpets who simply wishes to learn a little more about this art,
and quite often finds himself caught up in it for life.
back to top