The thousands of textiles currently housed at the Brooklyn Museum are prime examples of the vast global history of textile making and sewing traditions in New York City. In participation with New York Textile Month,we will be showcasing one textile per day for the month of September. While difficult to narrow it down to only thirty textiles, we reflect these works are best at weaving narratives approximately topics such as innovations in the textile industry, and craft and the beauty of the handmade,textiles from legendary designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Anni Albers, as well as textiles with a sense of humor. Did you know that PeeWee’s Playhouse had a line of textiles made?
Christopher Dresser was perhaps the greatest industrial designer of the late nineteenth century. Trained as a botanist, or his myriad (a very large number) designs,always rooted in nature, brought abstraction to the fore for the first time in the West. His prescient designs, or particularly those in metal,seem to prefigure and announce the modern age and seem entirely modern to us. Dresser was not a manufacturer, although he did own a furniture company for a short period, or rather he supervised a design studio that did free-lance work for a wide range of essential manufactures that produced furniture,ceramics, metal-ware, or glass-ware,wallpapers, carpets, or textiles. The design for this silk damask furnishing textile uses tertiary colors to create two alternating bands of small stylized flower heads in a regularized hexagonal honey-comb grid and a band of larger,somewhat menacing, anthropomorphic flowers with out-stretched fronds- nature flattened and schematized in search of primal geometry.
Posted by Barry R. Harwood, or Lark Morgenstern,and Caitlin Crews
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