Displaying items by tag: textiles

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art recently acquired Maya’s Quilt of Life, 1989, (acrylic on canvas and painted, dyed and pieced fabrics) by Faith Ringgold, from the art collection of the late author and activist, Maya Angelou. The work hung in Angelou’s home and was commissioned by Oprah Winfrey for Angelou’s 61st birthday.

Ringgold is well-known for her painted story quilts, which unite a tradition of representational painting with the rich history of quilting in the African-American community. The border of Maya’s Quilt of Life is made from pieced-together fabric that frames Angelou, who is surrounded by flowers in her signature patterned African dress and head wrap.

The 100th anniversary celebration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian Art department continues this month with the opening of exhibitions on Chinese lacquer and textiles.

The show on lacquer, which opened Saturday, includes works donated in March by the philanthropists Florence and Herbert Irving — among them trays, dishes and boxes, some made of carved red and black lacquer, others inlaid with mother-of-pearl or gold. Historical narratives, mythical animals and motifs symbolic of longevity and prosperity are pictured.

The inimitable Baltimore Summer Antiques Show will celebrate its 35th anniversary from August 20 to August 23, 2015, at the Baltimore Convention Center. Located in the flourishing Inner Harbor area of downtown Baltimore, the fair is the largest indoor antiques show in the country.

Produced by the Palm Beach Show Group, the 2015 Baltimore Summer Antiques Show will feature nearly 400 international exhibitors offering everything from furniture, silver, Americana, porcelain, glass, and textiles to major works of fine art, antique and estate jewelry, and Asian antiquities. According to Scott Diament, CEO of the Palm Beach Show Group...

Opening this summer at the New Orleans Museum of Art, A Louisiana Parlor: Antebellum Taste & Context is an exhibition featuring the Butler-Greenwood Plantation parlor furnishings acquired by the museum from descendants of the family in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The 1850s/60s parlor suite has survived with original textiles and rich documentation, making it one of the South’s best preserved examples of a pre-Civil War Louisiana interior.

The exhibition explores the relationship between this refined interior and its layered historical context through family portraits on loan from The Historic New Orleans Collection and through documents housed in the Mathews family archives of letters, receipts, and bills of sale held at LSU Library Special Collections.

The unique atmosphere of The Frick Collection has as much to do with the decorative arts as with the old master paintings that line the museum's walls. Indeed the enamels, clocks and watches, furniture, gilt bronzes, porcelain, ceramics, silver, and textiles far exceed in number, and are the equal in quality, of the works on canvas and panel.

The institution announces the publication of the first handbook devoted to the decorative arts in the collection.

Pairing luxurious textiles from Turkey, Iran, and Syria with richly detailed 17th-century paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters, the exhibition "A Thirst for Riches: Carpets from the East in Paintings from the West" opened June 6 at the Aga Khan Museum. Running until October 18, the exhibition features signature carpets and paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, supplemented by loans from the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto; the Leiden Collection, New York; the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Marshall and Marilyn R. Wolf Collection, Toronto.

Fraktur—decorated Germanic manuscripts and printed documents—have long been admired as an extraordinarily vibrant and creative art form (Fig. 1). A European tradition brought to America by German-speaking immigrants, who began settling in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1683, fraktur are among the most distinctive and iconic forms of American folk art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was one of the first major institutions to collect Pennsylvania German fraktur and decorative arts. In 1897, then-curator Edwin Atlee Barber acquired the museum’s first fraktur and, in 1929, the museum opened to the public the first period rooms of Pennsylvania German art. Many of the furnishings were donated by J. Stogdell Stokes, with additional furniture, ironwork, textiles, redware, and other objects acquired from Titus C. Geesey. The museum’s fraktur were never on par with the rest of the collection, but with the recent promised gift of nearly 250 fraktur from the collection of Joan and Victor Johnson (Fig. 2), the museum’s fraktur collection is now one of the finest in the country.

The Johnsons, Philadelphia natives, began collecting fraktur nearly sixty years ago, initially to help fill the walls of a historic farmhouse they bought and restored after their marriage in 1955. Joan, who studied contemporary art at Goucher College, loved the Bauhaus and planned to collect accordingly—but Victor, who worked in the computer industry, didn’t want to live with modern art.

Visit InCollect.com to read more about Pennsylvania German Fraktur.

Since its founding in 2007, Gil Walsh Interiors has quietly emerged as a premier design firm, noted not only for exquisitely detailed work, but also for the diversity of their projects. From luxury homes, country clubs, and executive offices to elegant resort hotels, the Gil Walsh touch has brought a unique sense of place to distinguished interiors from coast to coast. With offices in Palm Beach and Martha’s Vineyard, the firm applies cutting edge methods and materials to produce environments that transcend trends, while taking into consideration the client’s unique vision.

The firm is helmed by Gil Walsh -- one of the country’s leading interior designers, best known for her refined aesthetic and knack for seamlessly integrating style and function into all of her projects.

Visit the full collection on InCollect.com to view all of Gil Walsh Interiors’ top Palm Beach picks, including mid century modern furniture, rare textiles, and eclectic decorative objects.

A new museum in Washington will showcase a wide variety of art, history and culture through ancient textiles and a significant collection on the history of the nation's capital — while also signaling a major expansion in the arts for George Washington University.

The university opened the $33 million complex Saturday on its downtown campus where two museums will share one facility. The six-story complex is the new home for Washington's 90-year-old Textile Museum and its collection of 19,000 artifacts, along with a new museum featuring maps and documents tracing the capital city's history.

Despite the sometimes irreconcilable differences that culminated in the Civil War (1861-65), Newport and other Northern cities maintained close social, economic, cultural, and artistic ties with the South from the Colonial period through the Gilded Age. The 2015 Newport Symposium, North and South: Crosscurrents in American Material Culture, invites a fresh look at regional differences in American furnishings, silver, textiles, painting, architecture, and interiors to reveal the complex exchange of ideas and enduring influences.