Namrata Dalela has been working with textile collections and its different aspects in museums.
She has been a resource person for workshops, demonstrating and propagating textile conservation practices amongst curators in museums in India. Her most recent assignment was as a Conservator, doing curative and preventive conservation in the Textiles Gallery at the National Handlooms and Handicrafts Museum (Crafts Museum, New Delhi). She has taught master’s courses relating to textile conservation and documentation at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi and the Lady Irwin College, as a guest faculty. She did a Research Fellowship at Museum Conservation Institute at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C working on unique problems in textile conservation. Anoxic treatments for pest control, role of static in display of silk, stain removal, and storage of feather boas are a few problems she worked on. She worked on the costume collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She also did research on the Picchwai temple hangings of Nathdwara at the Smithsonian, which included documentation of materials, technique and stylistic features, an analysis of pigments, the deterioration observed, and the conservation decisions made to stabilize them. In April 2022, she conceived and executed a community-based memory project, “Lost and Found” at the Gandhi Memorial Center, Washington DC. It exhibited objects with personal stories and also included an audio-visual archive of stories made into a small film. History, textiles, dress, ethnography, interaction with craftsmen, craft documentation, understanding of textile techniques and conservation are her favored pastimes and she shares the findings widely with family, friends, students and the diplomatic community.
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