This strikingly modern textile was a collaborative effort between American abstract painter Kenneth Noland and Navajo weaver Mary Lee Begay. Talented Navajo weavers usually create from memory, but in this case Begay agreed to work from Noland's painted design.
:Textiles play a more important role in our lives than many of us realize. To a great extent, our homes and their furnishings do much to shape our everyday living experience. Moreover, each country and culture creates living environments that reflect its social traditions, aesthetic preferences, political and economic circumstances and local ambience.
This phenomenon is gracefully explored in "The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection,"
an exhibition on view at the Textile Museum through January 11. It comprises 17 furnishing fabrics from the museum's large collection, including rugs, wall hangings, chair covers, cushions and other textiles used in domestic interiors. Created to provide comfort, enjoyment, color, pattern and protection in homes from the ancient Mediterranean world to Twentieth Century America, these fabrics document the lifestyles of their original owners, as well as the technical and aesthetic achievements of their makers. It is curated by Lee Talbot, associate curator of eastern hemisphere collections.
"The Art of Living"
offers fascinating insights into talented artisans who have created ornamental textile designs over the years and the cultural contexts in which they worked. Most finished cloths are the product of a combination of talents — from designers, spinners and dyers to weavers or embroiderers — although, occasionally, one talented craftsperson can do it all.
Worldwide, court and commercial textile makers have usually separated design from manufacture. From ancient times to today, artists have created decorative patterns for the fabrics used in homes of the well-to-do.
"Art by the Yard” furniture by Robin Day, vividly colored furniture and textile furnishings in the exhibition at the Textile Museum, suggest how postwar designers revolutionized British styles. —Katy Uravitch photo
As curator Talbot observes, "In sophisticated court cultures across Europe and Asia, highly trained artisans created decorative patterns for a variety of media, including textiles, utensils and architectural ornament for rulers' residences." He suggests that the textiles in the show demonstrate that "their designs sometimes traveled across social strata and international borders, and patterns created in one part of the world became integral to the decorative vocabulary of people far removed in place and time."
The oldest textile in the exhibition, a Fifth Century tapestry-woven fragment from Egypt, may have covered the kind of bolster pillow portrayed in wall paintings of late Roman times. In those days, professional artists were often employed to draw designs on paper that could be adapted for a variety of media. The fragment on view, featuring scrolling vines, rosettes and birds, reflects motifs developed by Mediterranean-world artists that were adopted by designers worldwide.
A fragment of an Eleventh or Twelfth Century Chinese silk hanging or cover documents the manner in which tapestry techniques and naturalistically rendered bird and flower patterns were conveyed from the West to East Asia along the Silk Road. Here, fine depictions of ducks, peacocks and other birds holding in their beaks symbols of immortality fly before a floral backdrop.
A fragment of a curtain or hanging that likely decorated an opulent Spanish interior in the late Fifteenth to early Sixteenth Century is finely woven with silk and metallic yarns in horizontal bands of contrasting colors and designs. This example shows the melding of Islamic and European styles after Christians reconquered southern Spain from the last sultan in 1492.
