Foundation’s Grants to Fashion and Textiles
Field Reach Nearly a Half-Million Dollars in 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 5, 2008
The Coby Foundation, Ltd., which directs all of its support to projects in the textile and needle arts field, made grants totaling $479,000 to seventeen organizations in 2007, its fourth full year of funding. The only foundation in the country to focus solely on the textile field, the Coby Foundation, located in New York City, limits its support to non-profit organizations in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
In 2007, the Coby Foundation’s largest award was also its first to an organization in Maine. The Maine State Museum received $100,000 for an exhibition entitled Uncommon Threads: Wabanaki Textiles, Clothing and Costume, which will be the first major exhibition and publication documenting the textile traditions of these indigenous people from prehistoric times through the late 19th century. The exhibition opens in Augusta in June 2008 and will travel to five additional museums.
Three organizations were awarded grants of $50,000. The Museum of the City of New York received support for an exhibition, opening in early 2009, of fashions by Valentina, a designer active in the mid-20th century and now largely forgotten, who counted Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn among her clients. The New Bedford Whaling Museum was funded for an exhibition, currently on view, that examines the roles that working with a needle has played in the social, economic and cultural lives of New Bedford’s men and women. The Foundation has awarded the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate funds for researching its world-famous textile collection and making it accessible on the Web.
The remaining grants varied across the textile field, ranging from The Textile Society of America ($10,500), which received support for an important survey designed to gauge the current state of scholarly publishing in textile-related disciplines, and to identify problems and potential opportunities; to a grant for a major exhibition and catalog of Pennsylvania hooked rugs at the Lancaster Quilt & Textile Museum ($40,000); to a large-scale, long-term installation by Amsterdam-based textile artist Fransje Killaars at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams ($15,000); and an exhibition, which opened February 1 at the Museum at FIT in New York, entitled Madame Grès: Sphinx of Fashion, which focuses on the work of the noted Parisian couturière and dressmaker, Madame Alix Grès.
Other organizations receiving Coby Foundation support include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for planning an exhibition of Indian export textiles from England’s Ashburnham Place; the Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, NJ for an exhibition of work by the contemporary basketmaker Nancy Moore Bess; and Hajji Baba, Inc. for a seminar on carpets in association with an exhibition, From Steppe to Salon, that they are organizing at the New-York Historical Society in April. The Foundation is also helping to underwrite the conservation treatment of a mid-twentieth-century needlepoint screen on view at Gracie Mansion, a project funded through the Historic House Trust of New York City.