Grants to Fashion and Textiles Field
from
Coby Foundation Exceed Half-Million
Dollars
for First Time in 2008
Foundation Launches Pilot Initiative
for Unseen Museum Collections
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 6, 2009
The Coby Foundation, Ltd., which directs all of its support to projects in the textile and needle arts field, made grants totaling $525,000 to fourteen organizations in 2008. 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. The 2008 grants represented an astonishing range of cultures, textile traditions and periods: from contemporary East African printed textiles; modern Bengali quilts and Japanese textiles to 18th-century American needlework. 19th century German Torah binders and 21st century high fashion in the Goth style.
In 2008, the Coby Foundation’s largest award, a grant of $90,000, went to the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford for Arts and Accomplishments: Early American Needlework in Connecticut, 1740 – 1840, scheduled to open in fall 2010. The grant, to be paid out over three years, also fell under the Foundation’s new initiative for exhibiting and documenting textile collections in museums that have not mounted a major exhibition of items from their textile collection in at least three years. Other awardees under the new initiative were the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Nakshi Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal, scheduled for fall 2009 ($40,000), and the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake for its first textile exhibition, Common Threads: 150 Years of Adirondack Quilts and Comforters ($18,000), scheduled for spring 2009.
The Foundation awarded three planning grants under the collections initiative: to the Ukrainian Museum in New York for an exhibition of Ukrainian wedding-related textiles ($30,000) and to the Yeshiva University Museum, also in New York, for an exhibition of wimpels, northern European Torah binders made of swaddling clothes ($30,000). The third planning grant went to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont for its project to add costumes to its period rooms in a project entitled In Context: Clothing and Interiors, 1750-1950 ($22,000).
The Foundation supported six projects that focus on modern and contemporary textiles and fashion. The largest of these grants, $50,000, went to the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, for a fifty-year retrospective of the work of celebrated fiber artist, Sheila Hicks. The Foundation made its first grant to the Japan Society in New York for Serizawa: Master of Japanese Textile Design ($20,000), which will present this late Japanese textile master’s first major New York exhibition. The Museum at FIT, in New York, received $50,000 for the fashion survey entitled Gothic: Dark Glamour, which opened this past September. Two institutions are currently featuring Coby-funded exhibitions of contemporary African textiles: the Erie Art Museum in Kanga & Kitenge: Cloth and Culture in East Africa ($40,000) and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, which is presenting The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art ($35,000). In March 2009, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will be presenting Fashioning Felt, which will explore the varied new uses of this ancient material ($30,000).
Coby funds helped make possible a major exhibition, Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony, on view last summer at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem ($50,000), and the distribution of a film, Blue Alchemy: Stories of Indigo, by independent filmmaker Mary Lance (20,000).