Textile Museum Press Room

Tent hanging, Golconda, India, 1650 – 1780. The Textile Museum 6.129. Acquired by George Hewitt Myers in 1947.

In February 2010, The Textile Museum will begin a year-long look at the role of fabrics in interior design with the opening of The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection. The exhibition highlights the historical and cultural breadth of the museum’s collection through the display of 17 furnishing fabrics, including rugs, chair covers, cushions, wall hangings, and other textiles used in domestic interiors. Made to provide protection and comfort, and to embellish homes from the ancient Mediterranean world to 20th-century America, these fabrics document the lifestyles enjoyed by their original owners as well as the technical and artistic accomplishment of their creators. The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection will be on view February 12, 2010 through January 9, 2011.

About the Exhibition

The Art of Living explores how homes and furnishings shape the human experience of everyday life, and how each culture creates living environments that reflect its own social traditions, aesthetic preferences, political and economic circumstances, and local climate. The exhibition focuses particularly on the design of textile furnishings and the people who created their ornamental patterns. “Although one maker’s talented hands may produce a textile from fiber to finished product, more often the combined skills of many people—from spinners, dyers and designers to weavers or embroiderers—create the finished cloth,” explains exhibition curator Lee Talbot, associate curator for Eastern Hemisphere Collections at The Textile Museum. 

The Art of Living provides a historical context for the museum’s major spring/summer exhibition, Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain, which focuses on the careers of three 20th-century British designers and the socio-historical circumstances that informed their design choices. The Art of Living sheds light on these women’s forebears—the talented artists who created textile patterns in centuries past.

Exhibition Highlights

The earliest textile in The Art of Living is a 5th-century tapestry-woven fragment found in Egypt, which may have covered a bolster pillow. In the Roman and Byzantine Empires, as in many urban cultures around the world, professional artists drew designs on paper to be adapted for a variety of media. A few of their drawings on papyrus have survived, some of which appear to be cartoons for tapestry woven fabrics. This fragment features scrolling vines, rosettes and birds—motifs developed by artists in the Mediterranean world but adopted by designers worldwide. 

An 11th- or 12th-century Chinese silk documents how the naturalistic rendering of bird and flower patterns, as well as the tapestry technique, spread along the Silk Road from the West to East Asia. Like their counterparts in the West, Chinese artists typically drew cartoons for tapestries and designs for other fine decorative arts on paper. With the export of silks and ceramics, the flower and animal patterns developed over the centuries by Chinese artists became some of the most influential designs in the world. In this exhibition, a throne cover from Bhutan appliquéd with bird and flower patterns and a colonial Peruvian wall hanging fragment depicting phoenixes and peonies illustrate the global reach of these decorative motifs.

The Designers

Although the names of very few textile designers from the ancient world are known today, surviving records from 18th century onward, particularly in Western countries, more readily link the names of individual artists to particular designs. Four textiles in The Art of Living can be attributed to known designers: Ghiyath al-Din Ali, a designer/weaver who achieved high rank at the court of Abbas I (1571-1629) in Iran; William Morris (1834-1896), the seminal 19th-century British designer; and Kenneth Noland (1924- ), an American abstract painter who provided designs for a series of tapestries woven by Navajo weavers. Bridging Art by the Yard with The Art of Living is a special loan from the Cora Gingsberg Gallery—an exquisite silk designed Anna Maria Garthwaite (1690–1763), one of Britain’s most prolific and highly regarded textile designers of the 18th century. 

Whether anonymous or highly celebrated, the designers represented in The Art of Living enhanced the daily lives of the people who originally used these beautifully patterned fabrics in their homes, and they continue to delight viewers today with their artistry.

For more information or images, please contact Cyndi Bohlin at (202) 667-0441, ext. 78, or by e-mail at cbohlin@textilemuseum.org.

For more information, or to view the press release, CLICK HERE (pdf)

To see selections from the exhibition, CLICK HERE (pdf)

To request images for press use online, CLICK HERE