FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 1, 2007


The Coby Foundation, Ltd. made grants totaling a record $407,000 to fifteen organizations in its third full year of funding projects in the textile and needle arts field. The Foundation, located in New York City, remains the only foundation in the United States with this specialty. Its support is directed to non-profit organizations in the Mid-Atlantic and New England.

Coby Foundation grant recipients in 2006 were an especially varied group, ranging from the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate for the exhibition and catalogue for this coming spring’s Quilts in a Material World: Selections from the Winterthur Collection ($50,000), to the Erie Art Museum in northwestern Pennsylvania for planning of an exhibition of the East African textiles called kanga and kitenge ($10,000) in 2008.

A major grant ($50,000) went to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York for its lively survey, currently on view, entitled Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting, which explores the rise to prominence of knitting, crocheting and lace making in the work of contemporary artists. Two grants supported provocative examinations of fashion. One was given to the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology for last autumn’s Love and War: The Weaponized Woman ($35,000), which looked at the influence of armor and lingerie on contemporary fashion, and the other to the Godwin-Ternbach Museum of Queens College ($10,000) for The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalization, which was on view last spring and is traveling to the Museum of Folk Art and Craft in San Francisco at the end of 2007.

The Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford received $40,000 for research and planning for Arts and Accomplishments: Connecticut Women and their Needlework, 1740-1840, scheduled for fall 2008, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was awarded funds ($50,000) to allow for wider dissemination of its distinguished collection of Asian textiles.

Other New York City organizations receiving Coby funds included the Bard Graduate Center for last summer’s retrospective exhibition, Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum for the exhibition Multiple Choice: From Sample to Product, scheduled for fall 2007; and the Asia Society for The Arts of Kashmir, scheduled for fall 2007. The Foundation is also helping to underwrite the conservation treatment of a 16th century Flemish tapestry that hangs in the reading room of the architecturally distinguished New York Academy of Medicine headquarters on upper Fifth Avenue.