The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Archives

Ms. Tracy Krumm is director for artistic advancement at the Textile Center of Minnesota, where she also serves as curator, McKnight Fellowship director, and program consultant. An artist and educator with more than 35 years of experience, she has exhibited, taught, and lectured extensively. Her leadership and administrative work spans more than two decades of teaching, mentorship, and committee service, including appointments as visiting assistant professor at North Carolina State University’s art and design program and as assistant professor of fiber art at Kansas City Art Institute. She has served as a visiting artist and lecturer at over 30 institutions nationwide, leading workshops and critiques for college students, lifelong learners, and practicing artists in fiber art and textile traditions. Her honors include a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, nominations for both USA Artist and the Tiffany Foundation Biennial awards, two International Folk Art Foundation project grants, and two Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grants.

Her work has been included in the International Triennial of Tapestry, the Cheongju Craft Biennale, the Betonac Prize, and Young Americans in New York, as well as in more than 200 other exhibitions around the world. In 2012, the National Museum of Women in the Arts named her a Woman to Watch. Her work has also been featured in publications like the New York Times, Metalsmith, Sculpture, American Craft, and Surface Design Journal, as well as in the books, Textiles: The Art of Mankind (Thames & Hudson, 2012) and Cloth 100 Artists (Abrams, 2025).

Ms. Krumm’s work is part of the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Denver Art Museum, Kansas State University, Bloomingdale’s, the U.S. Embassy in Djibouti, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Ford Motor Company, and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Ms. Krumm’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing a collaborative model of co-creation between U.S. and Indian artists through Gujarat’s textile traditions – ajrakh, bandhani, weaving, and embroidery. Moving beyond transactional designer–artisan relationships, it is emphasizing upon shared authorship, fair trade, and artisan agency. The project, through studio exchange, reciprocal teaching, and fieldwork with the Khatri and Vankar communities, as well as with nomadic communities, is expected to generate new textile vocabularies, strengthen artisan visibility, and support sustainable livelihoods. The outcomes of the project – collaborative works, exhibitions, and publications – will extend impact across artistic and academic communities, thereby offering a replicable framework for equitable cross-cultural collaboration.

Cecilia Giancola is a graduate of Bard College, where she majored in historical studies and minored in economics. She has worked as a research assistant to Professor Karen Barkey, a historical sociologist of empires, with whom she has co-authored a forthcoming chapter on states and empires for the Encyclopedia of Global Social Theory. Through Bard College’s senior-to-senior grant, Cecilia conducted archival research at the British Library in London in January 2025, which contributed to her senior project, a thesis-length work entitled “‘An Engagement of Extraordinary Nature:’ Baroda, the Bankers’ Army, and the British Bahendari, 1800–1833”. The project won the Marc Bloch Prize for the best Senior Project in History. Cecilia is also a recipient of Bard’s Li-hua Ying Fund for Asian Studies. In her junior year, she had won the Margaret and John Bard award for excellence in social studies.

Cecilia is interested in the processes of state formation and consolidation, with special attention on colonial states. This led Cecilia to explore the British East India Company, a corporation which managed the first century of British colonial rule in India. She is particularly interested in how Indian bankers and other financial agents clashed (and meshed) with the Company in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her other interests include the political and social mechanisms of debt in India, the role of tax revenues in facilitating the drain of wealth from India, and the social culture of India’s early colonial society.

Cecilia’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting archival research focusing on the operations of the Baroda (Gaikwad) state in western India during the 19th century, narrowing in on its interactions with the British Raj under the context of “smuggling” and illicit trade policies. Specifically, she is examining the role of the Malwa opium trade, an indigenously controlled trade which rivaled the East India Company’s Bengal opium monopoly. Cecilia is exploring to what extent opium trade and “smuggling” was utilized by the British as a pretext for the expansion of the colonial state and the elimination of powerful indigenous capital in Baroda and western India.