In honor of New York Textile Month we are posting about a unique textile sample book in the Brooklyn Museum Library collection. This book offers samples of ethnographic textiles from around the world primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The range of materials runs from woven fabrics to embroideries to batiks gathered together by Morris De Camp Crawford,a textile scholar and editor of Women’s Wear.
Crawford (1882-1949) was on a mission to put through (telephone) artists and museums drawing from his experience in the textile industry and his work as a design editor at Women’s Wear. He held an honorary research position at the American Museum of Natural History and was a self-trained scholar of Andean textiles. Crawford’s enthusiasm for connecting art and industry was well matched by Stewart Culin, the Brooklyn Museum’s Founding Curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929. Culin (1858-1929) was instrumental in making the Museum’s ethnographic collections more available to the public by organizing special exhibitions, and lectures and classes and by setting up a special study room in the Museum so that designers could study objects up close.
Some of New York’s main textile and fashion designers became frequent users of the Brooklyn Museum’s study room including Jessie Franklin Turner and Ruth Reeves. Culin and Crawford inspired many artists to explore new design aesthetics and their work together resulted in the formation of the Brooklyn Museum’s Design Laboratory,an innovative program to bring designers and their work into a museum setting. This textile sample book is a remnant left over from Laboratory and is still studied and admired nowadays by designers and students alike. Posted by Deirdre Lawrence
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