Pilgrim Hall Museum: Panel from Plymouth Tapestry showing Wampanoag Village of Patuxet (later Plymouth) before the arrival of English colonists. Indigenous families are gathering and planting corn near their seasonal homes (2022).
Pilgrim Hall Museum: Panel from Plymouth Tapestry showing Wampanoag Village of Patuxet (later Plymouth) before the arrival of English colonists. Indigenous families are gathering and planting corn near their seasonal homes (2022).
Aldrich Museum: Hangama Amiri, Bazaar, 2020, 168 x 312 inches, Various textiles, inkjet prints on paper and canvas, paper, plastic, acrylic paint, marker, polyester, tablecloth, faux leather.
Maryland Center for History and Culture: Claire McCardell, Popover dress in green plaid cotton, 1950s. Gift of Nancy Ackler.. Right: Hutzler’s Advertisement for Popover dress, 1957.
The Coby Foundation funded nineteen projects in its field, textiles and fashion, in 2022 and spent a total of $500,000 as museums welcomed visitors back into their galleries. The foundation funded a wide range of projects and periods, from Syrian Textiles Across Two Millennia at the Katonah Museum in Westchester to designer Claire McCardell’s mid-century fashions at the Maryland Center for History and Culture to the upcoming exhibition of works by Afghan Canadian artist, Hangama Amiri, at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT.
The largest grant, $100,000, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, which was dominated by a large number of spectacular tapestries. Bard Graduate Center received two grants, in 2021 and 2022, for the planning and implementation of Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, which presented this precious textile from its origins in the 16th century to the dress worn by Michelle Obama for the 2009 Inauguration ($80,000 total).
The Foundation funded a number of group shows, including the planning of Printed Textiles at the Schweinfurth Arts Center in Auburn, NY ($15,000), the recent exhibition at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, NY entitled Women’s Work ($15,000), and The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present, which opened last June at the Drawing Center in Downtown Manhattan ($25,000).
One-artist exhibitions continue to be an important element of Coby Foundation grantmaking. Apart from the Nick Cave: Forothermore exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum ($25,000) and the forthcoming Hangama Amiri solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum ($15,000), the Foundation gave funds to a new grantee, Pioneer Works, an artist and scientist-led cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for an exhibition of the work of artist Anya Kielar ($25,000); to the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA for a one-woman exhibition of acclaimed Baltimore sculptor and bead artist, Joyce Scott ($10,000); and to the Trustees of Reservations at Harvard Fruitlands Museum (MA) for a solo exhibition of textile artist Rachel Hayes ($20,000). The Foundation also granted $25,000 for the first exhibition in 20 years of fashions by the famed American sportswear designer, Claire McCardell, at the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore, which owns her archive.
Possibly the most unusual project of 2022 was a grant to the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, MA for its Plymouth Tapestry, a project to create a needlework narrative of Plymouth Colony from multiple cultural perspectives. The 120-ft. long embroidery is being created by artist Elizabeth Creeden and a group of volunteer embroiderers, with imagery and text based on research by a team of historians that includes Indigenous scholars ($25,000).