Jacket, late 1860s, Alaskan sealskin fur from upcoming Seal in the Everchanging Circumpolar, RISD Museum, Providence
Jacket, late 1860s, Alaskan sealskin fur from upcoming Seal in the Everchanging Circumpolar, RISD Museum, Providence
Queen of the Night opera costume worn by Marcella Sembrich, 1901. From The Sembrich, Bolton Landing, NY.
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The Coby Foundation funded twenty-two projects in its field, textiles and fashion, in 2023 and spent a total of $752,500, the largest amount in over two decades of grantmaking. It supported a wide range of artists and subjects at institutions large and small, from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for Dress Up ($50,000) to the Thousand Islands Arts Center in Clayton, NY for its exhibition, Color Culture: Our History and Heritage through Fiber ($7,500).
The largest grant, $75,000, went to the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library for Ann Lowe: American Couturier, a retrospective of the Black fashion designer who designed couture-quality gowns for prominent women such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Olivia de Havilland, and Marjorie Merriweather Post. Funding in the amount of $60,000 went to the Science History Institute in Philadelphia for BOLD: Color from Test Tube to Textile, an exhibition exploring the history of textile dyes from the earliest dyes through the mass-marketed color revolutions of the 20th century into the more environmentally-minded present.
In 2023, The Foundation supported many exhibitions of the work of Native American artists and craftspeople, including the fourth-generation Navajo weaver, Melissa Cody, at MoMA PS1 ($25,000), and the Oglála Lakȟóta artist Suzanne Kite sponsored by the River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, NY ($5,000). Coby Foundation support also went to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian for an exhibition of the Navajo (Diné) tapestry artist D.Y. Begay ($25,000). The Foundation was a major supporter of Jeffrey Gibson’s new commission POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT, an immersive installation that will fill a football field-sized gallery space at MASS MoCA and will be home to a series of performances by Indigenous creatives from across North America. Gibson is a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee ($40,000). The Foundation also funded an upcoming exhibition at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI that will explore the web of narratives surrounding the use of sealskin by Alaska Native, Inuit and First Nations people ($40,000).
Coby Foundation funds helped underwrite the first outdoor installation by one of the country’s most prominent textile artists, Sheila Pepe, which was presented by the Madison Square Park Conservancy in Lower Manhattan ($50,000). They also helped make possible an exhibition of the work of Florida-based Mexican-American artist, Pepe Mar, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse ($45,000).
The Sembrich, a historic property on Lake George that honors Polish opera singer Marcella Sembrich (1858-1935) at her former teaching studio on Lake George, received a grant to restore Sembrich’s Queen of the Night opera costume, which was first seen at the Metropolitan Opera in 1900. It is the centerpiece for The Sembrich’s 2024 Centennial Exhibition. ($30,000)