Myers Home // The Textile Museum
The Textile Museum
George Hewitt Myers founded The Textile Museum in 1925 with a collection of 275 rugs and 60 related textiles. During his time, The Textile Museum was open by appointment only and received several hundred visitors annually. By the time of his death in 1957, the collection had grown to include 4,600 rugs and textiles from Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Today The Textile Museum receives 25,000 to 30,000 visitors from around the world each year. Its collections include more than 18,000 textiles and carpets dating from 3,000 B.C. to the present. Four to six thematically based exhibitions are presented annually. Exhibitions are drawn largely from the collections, but also include other textile arts traditions such as American quilts and contemporary fiber art. The textiles are shown as art as well as placed in cultural context by exploring religious, social, artistic, economic and ecological aspects of the cultures in which they were created. A wide range of educational programming designed for audiences of varied ages and backgrounds accompanies the exhibitions.
The Museum also features the Activity Gallery where visitors can look, touch and try a variety of hands-on activities, including learning about the origin of where natural dyes come from or how to spin wool. Visitors can also explore textiles and their relationship to tradition, economy, environment and lifestyle. The Museum’s 20,000 title Arthur D. Jenkins Library offers cultural, artistic and technical information related to the textile arts through books, periodicals, videos and slides.
|
