WHAT

WHEN: Friday, March 12, 6-8 p.m.

WHERE: The Textile Museum, 2320 S Street NW, Washington DC 20008; Metro: Dupont Circle, Q Street exit

MEDIA CONTACT: Cyndi Bohlin, (202) 667-0441, ext. 78 or cbohlin@textilemuseum.org

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The Textile Museum has also rescheduled the following programs originally planned for this week:

LUNCHTIME GALLERY TALK
Sourcing the West
POSTPONED TO WEDNESDAY, FEB. 17, 12 PM
Led by Rebecca A.T. Stevens, Consulting Curator, Contemporary Textiles. Free; no reservations required.

EVENINGS AT THE TM
Creative Impulses: Japanese Fashion and Textiles
POSTPONED TO FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 6 PM
Presented by Yoshiko Wada. Fee: $20/members; $25/non-members. Advance registration required; space is limited. SOLD OUT. To be added to the waiting list, call (202) 667-0441, ext. 64. Evenings at The TM is sponsored by Eleanor T. Rosenfeld.

MEMBERS’ GALLERY TALK AND TOUR
The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection
POSTPONED TO SUNDAY, FEB. 21, 1 PM
Led by Associate Curator Lee Talbot. Free; reservations required. Call (202) 667-0441, ext. 64. Limited to 35 participants.

PUBLIC GALLERY TALK AND TOUR
The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection
POSTPONED TO SUNDAY, FEB. 21, 2 PM
Led by Associate Curator Lee Talbot. Free; no reservations required. Limited to 35 participants.

MATSURI: A MIDWINTER JAPANESE FESTIVAL FOR FAMILIES
POSTPONED TO SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 1-5 PM
This free festival offers hands-on art activities, demonstrations and performances for all ages. Free; no reservations required. Presented in cooperation with the Japan-America Society of Washington, D.C.

Young visitors at a recent TM family program

WHAT: Experience Japanese culture with the whole family at an afternoon festival held at The Textile Museum. This free program, co-presented with the Japan-America Society of Washington, D.C., includes hands-on activities, demonstrations and performances for all ages. Program highlights include:

• Dance performances by Shizumi Minale, a children’s dance troupe
• Introduction to Japanese culture and language
• Station to try on traditional Japanese children’s kimono
• “Chopstick challenge”
• Kamishibai – paper box theater presentations
• Japanese fish and fan decorating
• And much more!

WHEN: Sunday, March 7, 1-5 p.m.

WHERE: The Textile Museum, 2320 S Street NW, Washington DC 20008; Metro: Dupont Circle, Q Street exit

MEDIA CONTACT: Cyndi Bohlin, (202) 667-0441, ext. 78 or cbohlin@textilemuseum.org

Lucienne Day in 1952. Image courtesy the Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Manchester.

The Textile Museum was saddened to learn that designer Lucienne Day, whose work will be featured in The Textile Museum’s 2010 spring/summer exhibition, Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain, passed away on January 30, 2010 at the age of 93. Britain’s best known textile designer in the post-World War II period, Day created award-winning designs for wallpapers, tea towels, carpets and ceramics. She was especially renowned for her lively, colorful furnishing fabric patterns.

“Lucienne Day’s career was unparalleled,” said Lee Talbot, The Textile Museum’s Associate Curator of Eastern Hemisphere Collections and Coordinating Curator of Art by the Yard. “Her remarkable body of textile art remains a fresh source of artistic inspiration and visual delight, even into the 21^st century. I am pleased that we will be able to celebrate her creative designs with our Art by the Yard exhibition.”

A graduate of the Croydon School of Art (1934-7) and the Royal College of Art (1937-1940), Day’s commercial success began with her groundbreaking fabric Calyx, printed in 1951 by Heal Fabrics. Although the manufacturer was initially skeptical about Calyx’s avant-garde design, they decided to take a chance with the young designer’s refreshing and innovative ideas. This proved to be a brilliant choice for Heal, as Day soon became the star in the new era of British design. Her strengths as a textile designer stemmed from her sophisticated color choices, stylized references to nature, abstract forms and intriguing patterns inspired by Modernist painters such as Joan Miró and Paul Klee. Color was critical to the perfectionist and accomplished Day, so she worked closely with Heal Fabrics to ensure that her vision was properly executed in each “colourway” version of the final product. Although she worked for other furnishing fabric firms, it was Heal Fabrics for whom she produced over 70 textile designs.

Helix, 1970, Lucienne Day. Collection of Jill A. Wiltse and H. Kirk Brown, III.

Lucienne Day and her husband, furniture designer Robin Day (b. 1915), were key arbiters of taste as Britain’s most celebrated designer couple and together they popularized a sleek new aesthetic in British interiors. The couple was featured in a 1954 advertisement for a Hillman family car and a 1955 ad campaign for Smirnoff vodka. Magazine articles, such as one in the January 1954 issue of House and Garden spotlighting the Day’s London townhouse, allowed eager fans and consumers to peruse their choices in home décor. Lucienne and Robin Day came to personify the modern style in mid-century Britain, and consumers strove to emulate the lifestyle of this talented, successful, and attractive couple. Like many designers in the optimistic post-WWII period, they both believed in modern design’s transformative power to shape a better world, and sought to create beautiful, useful objects accessible to people of all income levels.

Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain, on view at The Textile Museum May 15, 2010 through September 12, 2010, illustrates the evolution of Day’s design style over the decades, from the playful linearity of her patterns in the early 1950s, to her experimentation with bold visual effects using black silk-screen patterns over fields of color in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and finally her dynamic Pop style of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Art by the Yard also includes textiles designed by two of Lucienne Day’s most accomplished contemporaries: Jacqueline Groag (1903-1985) and Marian Mahler (1911-1983).

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Arizona Sky, woven by Mary Lee Begay and designed by Kenneth Noland

The textile will be featured in the exhibition The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection, on view at The Textile Museum February 12, 2010 through January 9, 2011. The exhibit 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. 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.

Arizona Sky illustrates the collaborative effort between Noland (1924-2010), Navajo weaver Mary Lee Begay (1941- ), and tapestry producer Gloria F. Ross (1923-1998), who was also a trustee at The Textile Museum. Ross endeavored to heighten public appreciation of tapestry as an art form, bringing painters and weavers together to create outstanding works of textile art. In 1979, Ross began to work with Navajo weavers to create tapestries based on designs by Noland, whose bold geometric paintings she saw as well suited for Navajo looms and colors. Navajo weavers typically visualize their designs mentally, rarely committing them to paper, but for this unusual collaboration six Navajo weavers agreed to work from Noland’s painted designs. 

“The art world has lost an influential and inspiring figure with the passing of Kenneth Noland,” says Lee Talbot, The Textile Museum’s Associate Curator for Eastern Hemisphere Collections and exhibition curator for The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection. “We are proud to honor his legacy by showcasing his design in this exhibition.”

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WHAT: Explore The Textile Museum as a family during this ongoing program series. In this session, learn how people around the world communicate through fashion. Participants will visit stations where they will learn what their clothes communicate about textiles (Knit or weave? Natural or synthetic? Dyed or Applied?). They will identify the components of their own clothes and examine the function of different kinds of clothing for comfort, protection, warmth and other needs. Finally, they will create their own outfit by cutting out and applying fabric to paper fashion templates. This program is free with no reservations required.

WHEN: Saturday, January 23, 2010, 2-4 PM

WHERE: The Textile Museum, 2320 S Street NW, Washington DC 20008; Metro: Dupont Circle, Q Street exit

MEDIA CONTACT: Cyndi Bohlin, (202) 667-0441, ext. 78 or cbohlin@textilemuseum.org 

Students from Davis Elementary School pose with their work. Photo by Bill Petros.

This spring, thee local elementary and middle school classes in the District of Columbia will have the chance to take a special tour of an upcoming exhibition, and then create a unique piece of textile art to display at The Textile Museum for an entire month. For the sixth year running, The Textile Museum is inviting all 1st to 6th grade public or charter school classes in the District of Columbia to apply for our sixth-annual Museum-School Partnership. Starting in February, The TM will partner with three classes from local schools to learn about The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection (opening February 12, 2010), plan and create a unique textile art project, and exhibit the artwork at the museum during June 2010. Participating classes are also invited to a special recognition ceremony at the annual Celebration of Textiles (June 5 and 6, 2010) – attended by nearly 3,500 people last year.  

 For more information about the project, click here.

To add a teacher you know to our educator’s list, email info@textilemuseum.org.

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

In the Activity Gallery, visitors are encouraged to learn by touching, looking and doing. Touchable textiles ranging from a pile carpet to bark cloth illustrate the structures, techniques and processes used to create traditional textiles. Samples of fibers in various stages of processing (from silk worm cocoons to silk thread) and examples of dyestuffs (including crushed bugs!) are used to explain how natural fibers are prepared for weaving and how color has been imparted to fiber for thousands of years.

The refurbishment is intended to update the Activity Gallery and create a more flexible space that can accommodate exhibit-related hands-on activities for school groups and visiting families. “Through the generous support of a private donor, we are able to make changes in the Activity Gallery that will better serve our youth and family audiences,” explains Tom Goehner, the museum’s curator of education. “We plan to move the kiosks in the center of the gallery to the perimeters, and then add tables for hands-on projects and textile making.” This the first phase of the gallery refurbishment; the long-term goals are to incorporate an introductory video about the textile arts and additional computers, creating links between technology of the 21^st century and handmade textile traditions stemming back thousands of years.

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

The shop— voted as one of the ten best museum stores in the nation’s capital by National Geographic’s “Intelligent Travel” blog—offers a colorful selection of scarves, jewelry, books, fine fabrics and other handmade goods for sale. The stock is constantly changing and always unique. In conjunction with the museum’s two new fall exhibitions, Contemporary Japanese Fashion: The Mary Baskett Collection and Fabrics of Feathers and Steel: The Innovation of Nuno (on view from October 17, 2009 through April 11, 2010), visitors should expect to see fresh exhibition-related items for sale. The TM Shop is the only retailer in the DC Metro area carrying Nuno Corporation products, and its home decor from AMARIDIAN, a group of sub-Saharan designers, was recently featured in The Washington Post’s “Home and Garden” pages. View the press release, or visit http://www.textilemuseum.org/calendar/calendar.htm, for details on upcoming shopping events.

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

For a holiday shopping product preview, CLICK HERE (pdf)