Jean Shin, FALLEN, 2021. Olana State Historic Site, Courtesy the artist.
Jean Shin, FALLEN, 2021. Olana State Historic Site, Courtesy the artist.
Serape, Navajo, Wool, 1875, Courtesy Barnes Foundation. From “Water, Wind Breath, Southwest Native Art in Community”.
Dorothy Liebes, Mexican Plaid, Mixed Media, 1938. Courtesy Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum. From “Design, Texture and Color: Dorothy Liebes and the Textiles of the Modern Interior”
The Coby Foundation had an active year in 2021, providing $675,000 to 21 organizations for projects in textiles and needle arts, despite gallery closures and reduced attendance at museums in its region, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Below is information on twelve of the exciting projects.
The largest grant, $100,000, went for an exhibition, scheduled for 2023, of the work of textile designer Dorothy Liebes at Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian National Design Museum. From the late 1930s to the early 1970s, Liebes collaborated with the most important architects and designers of the period, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Frances Elkins, Henry Dreyfuss, Dorothy Draper, and Raymond Loewy. Much of the exhibition research was made possible using the Liebes papers in the possession of the Archives of American Art, the digitization of which the Coby Foundation recently supported.
The Foundation funded exhibitions of work by seven women artists who use textiles in their work, five of whom are artists of color. They included Lucia Hierro at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Cecilia Vicuña at the Guggenheim Museum, Marie Watt at the Hunterdon Art Museum, Sonya Clark at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Jean Shin at Olana State Historic Site, Lesley Dill at the Canterbury Shaker Village and Christina Forrer at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Coby Foundation funds also made possible a range of historical exhibitions from Maine to Pennsylvania. Among them, the Maine Historical Society received support for Northern Threads, a two-part exhibition exploring the history of fashion there, including the impact of the fur trade and textile and shoe industries, which helped drive the economy, while also having a devastating impact on Maine wildlife and the natural environment. ($25,000). The Newport Historical Society teamed up with Newport’s Audrain Auto Museum to present The World in Motion, Fashion and Modernity, 1885-1945, which examined a previously unknown collection of clothing and accessories belonging to three Vanderbilt women of New York and Newport. It also focused on a designer, Mollie O’Hara, an Irish immigrant who had a shop in Newport and sold gowns to the Vanderbilts. ($25,000). The exceptional late 18th and early 19th century textiles of New London County, CT will be the subject of an exhibition, Something in the Water, at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, ($35,000). It is a loan exhibition that will bring together locally-made quilts and embroidered coverlets that have migrated to public and private collections nationwide.
The Coby Foundation is helping Philadelphia’s Barnes Collection to mount Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in Community, which will spotlight Dr. Albert Barnes’s collection of Pueblo and Navajo art collected in the early 1930’s. The exhibition will highlight the connections between historical pieces and contemporary practices and will be supplemented by works by contemporary Native American artists and loans from other institutions. ($25,000).