#nytm2016

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?

Luke Haynes was trained as an architect, but was taught sewing as a child by his mother. His transition to quilt-making was inspired by his desire to have full control of his artistic impulses and see a project through to completion that he felt architecture did not always allow. The unusual perspective of this machine sewn portrait is “read” properly only when the quilt is horizontal on a bed. This play on perspective stems from sixteenth-century Mannerist art practices. The acquisition of this quilt was an intentional effort to bring the Museum’s historical quilt collection up to the present, and with a quilt made by a man to introduce the notion of gender-bending into a traditionally all-female genre.   

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?

Alexander Girard was one of the key American textile designers in the post-World War II period. Born in New York, Girard was raised and educated in Florence and Rome, Italy. From 1952-1975, he worked for Herman Miller Textiles and was responsible for many of their iconic designs that were used on the modernist furniture by Ray and Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Harry Bertoia, among others, produced by that firm. There are ten large Girard textile samples in the Museum’s collection with seven attached color-way swatches from Herman Miller, such as the one presented here, his “Millozenge” pattern that features a regularized pattern of small repeated diamonds. In addition to his work at Miller, Girard also designed the interiors of famous New York restaurants such as La Fonda del Sol, in the Time-Life Building, and L’Etoile. He totally transformed Braniff Airlines and revolutionized that industry with his “The End of the Plain Plane” campaign for which he reimagined the entire presentation of the company from designs for sugar-packets and ticket counters, to the exterior of the planes that he had painted in bright geometric patterns. He and his wife were passionate folk art collectors and they founded, designed, and built the Girard Foundation in Santa Fé, New Mexico to house their art.

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?

This appealing printed silk is typical of the large number of as yet undocumented textiles that are part of the Brooklyn Museum collection. About 3,000 textiles are in this category. They have been given generalized accession numbers, because the source of the donation, or purchase, is unknown. Presumably these textiles initially were part of the Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory collection and not part of the larger, more traditionally curated and accessioned textile collection. It depicts a female and male figure, perhaps dolls, in peasant dress that dance across the design linked by a braided rope. It is a sophisticated and well printed textile. 

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?

Cheney Brothers was one of the longest lived and most successful textile firms in the United States. Founded in 1838 at South Manchester, Connecticut, by four brothers, they succeeded first by cultivating a hardy American strain of the mulberry tree that could sustain silk worm production. They also learned how to process seemingly ruined silk cocoons into usable threads and pioneered new machinery. There are twenty-three Cheney examples of silk textiles and one synthetic one in the Museum’s collection. After the demand for high-end silk textiles softened due to the Great Depression, the firm opened the Pioneer Parachute Company and became an important supplier of synthetic textiles to the government. The also established a subsidiary, Cheney Fabrics, that focused on the weaving of synthetic furnishing textiles, an example of which is featured here. Named the “Jingle Jangle” pattern, this is a typical modernist Cheney Fabric production of the 1940s and 1950s. A simple palette of green, blue, and teal elongated geometric ornaments is arrayed vertically to create a lively, illusionistic “screen” on a white ground. By 1955 financial strain caused the family to sell the firm to J. P. Stevens, and in 1984 the last Cheney factory ceased operations. The extensive “factory town” built by Cheney Brothers is almost intact and has been preserved as an architectural historic district

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?

Michael Cummings is an African American fiber artist living in New York.  His “quilts” are more properly labeled wall-hangings as they are smaller than most traditional quilts and are not designed to be seen horizontally on a bed. Rather he is an artist who has chosen “quilting” as his medium. Most of Cummings’ quilts are depictions of Caribbean and African spiritual symbols, and evoke the African diaspora. His intentionally naïve hand-sewing also reflects the style of many older African American quilt-makers. This quilt was inspired by the election of our first African American President, and was the first object to celebrate Obama to enter the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. 

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?  

R. H. Mallison & Company was one the most fascinating textile firms in the United States in the early twentieth century. In 1893, Hiram Royal Mallinson joined the silk trade as a salesman at Pelgram & Meyer in Paterson, New Jersey, and by 1900 was a partner at the firm M. C. Migel in New York. In 1912, he became the sole owner and changed the name of the company to his own in 1915. The firm always concentrated on high-end designs and championed aggressive, American-style promotional campaigns and stylish graphics for their advertisements. They showed their textiles at the annual Industrial Art exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and other artistic venues. Their 1928 “American Indian” series was inspired by Native American art at the Brooklyn Museum. The silk crepe textile featured here was designed by Martha Ryther in 1923 as part of her “History of the Loom” series and has an Asian inspiration. The Great Depression had adverse effects on the firm; it filed for bankruptcy in 1936 and was eventually subsumed by the voracious Burlington Industries in 1955.

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?

Aviva Stanoff’s incredibly inventive designs betray her dual Japanese/American heritage. Aviva was trained at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. She initially worked in the fashion industry for Calvin Klein, but soon began to design her own textiles in her studio in Brooklyn. She is not a weaver; rather each yard of her textiles is uniquely designed and often composed of diverse materials. Her signature velvet textiles are decorated with realistic plant imagery. She impregnates carefully selected plant material with color and arranges them on the length of velvet required. Then, through her personal heat transfer method the images of the plants are embedded in the textile that retains the texture of the plant material. There are sixteen very varied examples of her work in the Brooklyn Museum collection. The textile highlighted here is really a collage and is composed of various textiles, metallic foil, and hand-painted tissue.

The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September.  While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we think these works are best at weaving narratives about topics such as innovations in the textile industry, craft and the beauty of the handmade, textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?

Anna Williams was an African-American quilter from Louisiana. She made quilts throughout her entire life, incorporating scraps of fabric including traditional printed cottons, unusual synthetics, and textiles adorned with sequins. In middle-age, she was recognized by artists and collectors who helped her exhibit and sell her quilts. The artist’s bold approach combines traditional block settings with free-flowing improvisation. What is truly masterful is her use of color. Although the quilt might appear chaotic at first, closer inspection recognizes that it is organized by pinwheel blocks. The acquisition of this quilt was an effort to expand the canon of the historical ones in the collection and include a quilt made by a woman of color.