Past Exhibitions
Browse the museum's past exhibitions, inlcuding those held at The Textile Museum's original location in Washington, D.C.'s Kalorama neighborhood. Designed to both present textiles as art, and to place them in their cultural context, Textile Museum exhibitions have primarily showcased its permanent collections, but also featured works from other textile arts drawn from a variety of public and private holdings.
The Art of Living: Textile Furnishings from the Permanent Collection
"The Art of Living" highlighted the historical and cultural breadth of The Textile Museum's collections through the display of textile furnishings made in societies ranging from the late Roman Empire and colonial Peru to Edo-period Japan and Victorian Britain.
Contemporary Japanese Fashion: The Mary Baskett Collection
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Japanese designers Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto shocked the fashion world by introducing avant-garde styles that challenged received Western notions
Fabrics of Feathers and Steel: The Innovation of Nuno
The exhibition featured eighteen examples of the Nuno studio's innovative and influential fabrics, dating from the time of the company’s founding in 1984 to the present.
A Lady Found a Culture in its Cloth: Barack Obama's Mother and Indonesian Batiks
For two weeks, textiles from the collection of Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother, were view at The Textile Museum.
Constructed Color: Amish Quilts
Amish quilts are among the most striking and famous of all American quilt types.
Recent Acquisitions
In the past eight decades, The Textile Museum’s collections have grown from a modest group of 275 rugs and 60 related textiles to nearly 18,000 objects from around the world.
Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas
The exhibition told the story of the people who made the textiles, the ways they lived and worked, and the functions of their weavings.
BLUE
The human perception of color is a complex sensory phenomenon filtered through the eyes, brain, language, and multiple layers of social experience.
The Finishing Touch: Accessories from the Bolivian Highlands
In 2007, The Textile Museum acquired a large group of charming accessories from the Bolivian highlands.
Private Pleasures: Collecting Contemporary Textile Art
Collecting has played a central role in the shaping of art history as a discipline.
Textiles of Klimt's Vienna
Vienna was a center of creative activity between 1897 and 1932 with the emergence of the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte.
Architectural Textiles: Tent Bands of Central Asia
This exhibition highlighted elaborately decorated tent bands made by different Central Asian ethnic groups, including Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Kazakh.
RED
RED explored the complex uses and meanings of red in textiles across time and place through twenty-one varied textiles from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Mantles of Merit: Chin Textiles from Mandalay to Chittagong
Mantles of Merit was the first major exhibition devoted to the sophisticated textiles from the Chin peoples, an ethnic minority group in western Myanmar, northeastern India, and eastern Bangladesh.
Harpies, Mermaids, and Tulips: Embroidery of the Greek Islands and Epirus Region
This exhibition included approximately seventy embroidered textiles created between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries for bridal trousseaux and domestic life.
On View
Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms
This traveling exhibition brings together Norman Rockwell's masterpieces with works by contemporary artists that explore freedom in today’s world.
Selections from The Textile Museum Collections
You can always find a rotating selection of objects from The Textile Museum collections on view in the museum's lower-level galleries, including many objects that have rarely or never before been displayed.
Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection
A selection of maps, letters, prints, and artifacts on display from the museum’s Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection includes recent acquisitions and rare treasures.
Textiles 101
Interactive displays allow you to enter the mind of an artist to explore fiber, structure, color, and the creative choices that influence textile design.
The George Washington University Museum
The Textile Museum
701 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052
Phone: 202-994-5200
[email protected]
