The Textile Museum, Revisited

I am having an internal mini-debate. It's about tradition versus innovation. Let me tell you how it started.

Earlier this month I went to a workshop about nihon shishu, the art of traditional Japanese silk embroidery. The samplers on display were beautifully stitched. The colors were striking, the patterns graceful. (Check out the Japanese Embroidery Center for an Art Gallery of nihon shishu.) I admired the virtuosity of the stitches and the time and care devoted to each one. I also responded to how meditative the handwork itself can be.

It's quite impressive that this form of embroidery has survived for more than 1,000 years, its rich history preserved. However, I was put off by the lack of innovation or improvisation allowed. Stitchers can use only set colors. New designs are discouraged until embroiderers reach a certain master level after years of apprenticeship (and thousands of dollars in kits). The appeal of learning a new technique for me is being able to use it in the context of my own work and not to copy set patterns.

Then I took a Friday Field Trip to The Textile Museum. It snapped me right out of my funk. The textile art on display (with descriptions that tell the cultural context of each item) made me realize that tradition and innovation are not opposing principles. Artisans are continually using traditional techniques and tweaking them. They collaborate with artists from other traditions. They experiment with newly available dyes. They borrow outrageously from other cultures. Click through The Textile Museum's online Textile of the Month Archives to find any number of examples. (And lots of inspiration for developing your own designs.)

The Textile Museum began with the founder's love for Oriental rugs. It could have remained a very traditional museum with a small audience of patrons. Instead it has broadened its collections and exhibits to reflect the dynamic changes in textiles. One recent exhibit showcased the wearable textiles of Japanese fashion designers. Another splashed bold Modernist fabrics by three prominent postwar British designers on the museum walls. (Check out the Flickr photos of the exhibit's mod opening.) Next month's featured exhibit explores the traditional weaving and dyeing technique from Central Asia known as ikat that fashion designers have incorporated into modern designs. In the winter and spring, ecoconscious design will be featured in two exhibits: recycled textiles and green textiles.

The setting for the Museum can be a little intimidating (at least it was for me). The collections are housed in two side-by-side townhouses next to Embassy Row in one of D.C.'s priciest neighborhoods. But crossing that invisible social divide was well worth it.

Although the Museum itself has more than 18,000 pieces of textile art, only a few pieces are shown at any one time in two main exhibit rooms. Unlike in larger museums in which there are too many pieces to even skim, the limited exhibit space at The Textile Museum gave me time to focus on the details of each piece. I learned how fiber becomes structure in a hands-on room that would be great for my kids. And I explored the museum shop, which Apartment Therapy has rated one of the top ten in the U.S.

If you decide on a field trip to The Textile Museum, I recommend a side visit to Looped Yarn Works and lunch at Teaism. Defintely a day out that would give you a healthy dose of tradition, innovation, and fun.

Friday Field Trip: The Textile Museum

Washington, D.C.'s Kalorama Neighborhood

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
--from "Little Gidding (No. 4 of "Four Quartets")," by T.S. Eliot

I'm intrigued by T.S. Eliot's idea of exploration. That we keep exploring unfamiliar places so that we can come home and make the familiar new again. More than that, Eliot might be saying that exploration leaves us with a deeper knowledge of our own "place" and ourselves. Perhaps familiarity breeds a dullness of vision, and it is by traveling and encountering new cultures that we fully open our eyes to an understanding of where we live; that the voyage to know what seems foreign is essentially a way to achieve self-knowledge.

The Spanish Steps

As I was walking along the streets of Washington, D.C. on my latest Friday Field Trip--a series of solo jaunts to get to know the Baltimore-Washington region where I'm now living--I could feel something waking up inside of me. It was partly the energy of the city, with people walking briskly and purposefully to their jobs. It was also the jarring strangeness and elegance of Embassy Row, where even the tiniest nations from all across the globe inhabit stately row houses.

Mostly it was the upsurge in memories of exploring other cities when I was younger and alive with dreams of what my future would hold: of getting off at a randomly chosen Metro station in Mexico City to walk around a neighborhood and imagine the dreams contained in each home; of staring up at the skyscrapers in Chicago's Loop and thinking about the great work I could do in each office; of biking along the beachfront path in Santa Monica and feeling the restless creativity of Los Angeles; of admiring the juxtaposition of art objects in a Phoenix museum.

The Textile Museum

I'm viewing these Friday Field Trips as ways to reconnect with myself, and more specifically with those entwined senses of imagination, curiosity, and wonder that sometimes get squashed as I'm driving carpool, folding laundry, or going about the daily-ness of living. There is wonder to be found in each of those activities (OK, maybe not in folding laundry) if I'm awake enough to see it, just as artisans wove wonder into the objects of daily life displayed in The Textile Museum's current exhibit, "The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings From the Permanent Collection."

There is wonder embodied in the exhibit's woven Victorian wallcovering of scrolled floral forms. In a brilliantly dyed Peruvian wall hanging that juxtaposes European, Asian, and Native American motifs. In the collaborative colored Vs of a rug woven by Navajo women and designed by a Modernist artist. In a massive embroidered wool rug stitched by a Mexican artisan in 1783.

George Hewitt Myers, who bought his first Turkish rugs in college and started The Textile Museum, recognized the wonder of these objects and collected them to understand the techniques, colors, and patterns that formed them. His quest to bring together astounding examples of non-Western textiles is a form of exploration, and one that ultimately helps us understand the textile beauty beneath our feet and all around us.

Prince Panda by Joseph Barbaccia

Friday Field Trip: Mt. Pleasant Farm

As I drive around my new home in Howard County, Maryland, I have been trying to make sense of the place. It's a sometimes uneasy mix of rural and suburban.

My daily drive to my son's school takes me along the busy county roads that shuttle commuters to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Alongside them the fields of sweet corn are spent, glowing golden in the sunny but cool early fall.

I take a winding side road to be sure to drive past an old stone farmhouse nestled in a green hollow. The long way around takes me past a stucco farmhouse built onto an original log cabin. The farm is perched atop a hill only a few feet away from the busy junction of two farm roads-turned highways.

However, between the surviving farms, small developments of McMansions increasingly dominate the landscape. Round a corner on the shady country lane, and the road is cleared of trees, opening up to reveal a sign advertising estates starting in the $750,000s. Though the loss of farmland to development slowed across Maryland between 2002 and 2007, Howard County itself lost more than 8,200 acres of agricultural land, a 22 percent decline.

This morning I decided to take a closer look at Howard County's rich agricultural heritage. I hiked the paths of the 300-year-old Mt. Pleasant Farm, which the Howard County Conservancy, the county's non-profit land trust, currently runs as an environmental education center.

I was drawn immediately to the Montjoy Barn, built in the late 1700s and moved to its current site for preservation. It is the oldest barn in Howard County and the only existing example of an English wheat barn in the county. Its horizontal siding sets it apart from the vertical board and batten barns on the rest of the farm.

Just past the barn a mowed trail winds through a meadow of goldenrod, thistle, and milkweed. Purple chicory flowers bloom low alongside the path.

Each dip and bend in the path reveals a new vista of native plants and grasses. At the bottom of the hill, a small stream lined with mica bounds the farm; a group of Conservancy volunteers closely monitors its water quality.

Another trail winds along the back of the farm, past a grassy meadow that must once have been corn fields. From there the noise of the cars on the road recedes, and the housing developments across the highway seem a world away. I notice the slender plastic tubes that protect the hardwood saplings from deer. In a few decades these young trees will have reforested some of the cleared areas. As those trees grow and leaf out, the pressure of population growth will no doubt continue to put more demands on the land, challenging residents to preserve at least as much as they take away.

Starting Small

I have a few designs emerging slowly from needle and thread on wool and stone. This Crewel Stone, for my friend Jackie at Smoothpebble, stitches the rich harvest of late summer and early autumn. It is golden; sun made manifest.

Happy birthday, Jackie.

I know that most of you have endless amounts of self-love and self-confidence, and you never wake up without them. However, for those of you who have moments, like me, when that reservoir of inner acceptance is running low, fill it up by reading this grace-filled post of Jackie's.

And a happy September to all of you.