When curators at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum were considering how to celebrate 100 years of one of the nation’s premier collections of non-Western textiles, they went back to the beginning. The Textile Museum was founded in 1925 by George Hewitt Myers (1875-1957), a collector and philanthropist whose collection began with the rugs decorating his student lodgings at Yale University. In acquiring pieces over his extensive collecting career, Myers’ highest priority was not a piece’s rarity or monetary value, as was the case for other collectors, but its “intrinsic beauty of design, color and technique”—the numinous quality of artistic merit.
“Intrinsic Beauty: Celebrating the Art of Textiles,” the museum’s spring centennial exhibition, draws its title from that principle. Accordingly, when putting it together, curators began with the pieces that spoke to them most strongly, said curator Lee Talbot, who collaboratively organized the exhibition with colleagues Sumru Belger Krody and Shelley Burian.
“Each curator came up with a list of what we thought [should be included], and then we actually physically printed out those images,” Talbot said. “We had hundreds and hundreds of images spread out in a conference room.”
There was a vast pool to draw from. When The Textile Museum was formally incorporated in 1925, Myers’ collection held 335 pieces, more than 80 percent of which were carpets. Today, the museum and its affiliated collections hold more than 25,000 textiles from the non-Western world, spanning five continents and 5,000 years of history.
From the hundreds of images flooding that conference room, Burian, Krody and Talbot negotiated an exhibition spanning historical era, geographic origin and artisanal technique—and, of course, many types of beauty.
Some pieces are astonishing for their virtuosity, like an Indonesian hip wrapper utilizing a wing motif and dark-blue dye reserved for older women of high social status and great artistic and spiritual skill. Others use material denoting the enormous wealth of the workshops that made them, like an 18th-century Buddhist priest’s silk mantle that is a particular favorite of Talbot’s: Its shining dragons are picked out in threads that were each individually hand-rolled with gold leaf paper. Others are as much fun as they are expertly crafted, like a large batik hanging from the 1930s that depicts—in the traditional style of Central Java—the rocket ships, tentacled creatures, mustachioed villain and spacefaring hero of the comic strip Flash Gordon.
The exhibition is also an opportunity to see pieces that are rarely displayed because of their age, fragility or size, Talbot said. A monolithic Persian carpet, probably originally displayed in a shrine, takes up two full stories and had to be installed using two forklifts. (It’s one of a pair, with its counterpart in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.) The vibrant reds, bright yellows and deep black of a Peruvian mantle depicting otherworldly figures seem to have barely faded since it was woven in the time of the Roman empire. And a small but mesmerizing Buddhist memorial piece is woven with human hair, probably the artisan’s own—a sign of devotion that, it was hoped, would hasten rebirth in paradise for the loved one to whom the piece was dedicated.
This last piece was recently studied by experts from the Tokyo National Museum, who Talbot said told him, “If this were in Japan, it would be a national treasure.” That’s typical of the quality of the museum’s holdings, which now include not only Myers’ legacy but philanthropic donations from other major collectors. These include the Murad Megalli collection of Central Asian ikats and Anatolian kilims; Guido Goldman’s favorite Central Asian ikats; the Bea Roberts Collection of Chinese Minority Textiles; and equestrian textiles donated by Judy Brick Freedman and Allen R. Freedman.
A fruitful partnership
2025 marks not only The Textile Museum’s centennial but also 10 years since the museum debuted in Foggy Bottom in a connected space incorporating both the museum’s three-story purpose-built facility and the historic Woodhull House. The latter houses the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection, nearly 2,000 prints, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, broadsides and photographs tracing D.C.’s founding and evolution that were donated to GW in 2011. Woodhull House is the current home of “A Tale of Two Houses,” an exhibition showcasing both Woodhull’s own history and that of The Textile Museum’s original historic building in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Because the Kalorama building was built as a private residence, it posed certain difficulties for curators, Talbot said. The European-style fireplaces throughout, for instance, had to be worked around not just spatially but aesthetically, as they posed a challenge for a museum focused on non-Western art. And certain pieces, Talbot remembered, could barely fit through the building’s residential-style doors.
In contrast, the museum’s current space is endlessly customizable, with two floors of open exhibition space that can be rearranged to serve the material. It is also able to host large-scale, site-specific installations like Anne Lindberg’s “what color is divine light?” in 2023.
Since arriving in Foggy Bottom, the museum has also ramped up and in some cases revitalized its scholarly, interactive and conservation efforts. It opened the Textiles 101 gallery, an immersive all-ages space demonstrating how textiles are made and showcasing videos of artists at work. It established the Avenir Foundation Conservation and Collections Resource Center on GW’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus to preserve and care for its collections. In 2018, a donation from the Markarian Foundation enabled the relaunch of the Textile Museum Journal, an annual scholarly publication founded in 1962 that had ceased publication in 2004. That same year, the museum acquired the massive Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection, comprising some 4,000 textile fragments. Two years later, it established the Cotsen Textile Traces Study Center, which now serves as a resource for both students and established scholars.
“One of those ‘only-at-GW’ moments”
On March 21, the museum held a student-centric anniversary celebration with gallery tours, performances by student groups, a mending workshop and a pop-up clothing exchange by The Loop. The day wasn’t just made for students; it was designed by them too. Museum Education Assistant Grace Lemoine, a senior international affairs and geography major who has worked at the museum since she was a sophomore, took a lead role in planning the celebration.
“This experience really is one of those ‘only-at-GW’ moments—being able to say that I work in a museum and I'm doing museum education, exhibition design, event management, all these different things that people go to graduate school for,” Lemoine said. “It's very rewarding—exhausting at times—but worth it.”
Lemoine, who is also a member of GW’s Responsible Fashion Collective, said one of her favorite things about working in the museum is the ability it gives her to connect with other times and cultures, to learn about techniques worth rediscovering in the age of disposable fast fashion. In the current exhibition, for instance, her favorite piece is a delicate blouse woven in the Philippines from piña, or pineapple leaf fibers.
“I absolutely love that one, not only because of the embroidery design and its cultural significance to the Filipino culture, but also because it's a sustainable fiber,” she said. “Something that’s really unmatched about this position is that I’m able to get all this knowledge of more sustainable fashion, which really complements my studies.”
Lemoine’s experience is the kind of student collaboration that museum staff say they hope to continue building upon in the decades ahead. They also plan to expand their partnerships with contemporary artists and with the heritage communities from which their pieces originate. (A second centennial exhibition, opening in the fall, will focus on the cultural significance of textiles around the globe.)
“Going forward, we want to be the strongest resource we can-–for the community, for scholarship and for artists,” Talbot said.
