2024

COBY FOUNDATION SUPPORTS TEXTILE PROJECTS
WITH NEARLY $800,000 IN FUNDING

New York, NY, January 30, 2025 — In 2024, the Coby Foundation awarded a total of $789,000 to 23 projects in the fields of textiles and fashion, the largest amount in the Foundation’s 23 years of grantmaking. Grants supported a wide variety of projects at museums and historical organizations from Maryland to Maine.

The majority of awards supported exhibitions showcasing the work of contemporary fiber artists, among them the Baltimore Museum of Art’s 2024 exhibition Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams, a retrospective that included examples of Scott’s dazzling beadwork and woven textiles ($15,000); the Schweinfurth Art Center’s Beyond the Surface: Contemporary Artists and Printed Textiles, which featured works that challenge conventional expectations of printed textiles ($50,000); the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston’s Tau Lewis: Spirit Level, the first US solo exhibition of the self-taught Jamaican-Canadian artist who transforms found materials into monumental sculptures ($15,000); and the Hudson River Museum’s No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor, a group exhibition that explores how artists have used clothing to play with assumptions about materiality and cultural identity, and as a vehicle for social and political activism ($15,000). Exhibitions opening in 2025 include Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets at the American Folk Art Museum, featuring the Brazilian self-taught artist’s vibrant large-scale embroideries ($30,000); The Living Temple at Ars Nova Workshop, a retrospective of Swedish interdisciplinary artist Moki Cherry ($35,000); Sonia Gomes: Abre-alas at the Storm King Art Center, a solo exhibition of the Brazilian artist who creates complex assemblages from textiles and everyday materials ($20,000); and Liz Collins: Motherlode at the RISD Museum, which will celebrate the Queer feminist artist noted for her radical experiments with fiber ($50,000).

The Foundation funded “Fiberations: The Evolution and Tradition of African American Fiber Aesthetics,” a colloquium at Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum that invited fiber artists, scholars, and curators to discuss the evolution of Black women fiber artistry past and present through artist conversations, a roundtable discussion, and loom weaving demonstrations ($14,000). 

The Coby Foundation continues to support projects featuring Native American textile arts. The Penn Museum received $50,000 for their newly reimagined Native North America Gallery, which will feature culturally significant textiles, beadwork, and basketry. The Concord Museum, in Concord, MA, is presenting Chemacheg Menuhki: Paddle Strong, an installation that will explore regional Indigenous history and contemporary textile arts practices through a fiber basket made by a contemporary Nipmuc artist ($15,000). 

Fashion-themed exhibitions included Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore, examining the everyday clothing of ordinary women organized by and drawn from the deep holdings of the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection ($25,000), and presented by the New-York Historical Society ($50,000); Influencers: 1920s Fashion and the New Woman, organized by Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, NY ($40,000); and Body by Design: Fashionable Silhouettes from the Ideal to the Real, an exhibition exploring the shaping of the body through undergarments, organized by Historic Deerfield in Deerfield, MA ($40,000). The Foundation also provided a planning grant and implementation support for the Hispanic Society Museum & Library’s 2025 exhibition Spanish Style: Fashion Illuminated, 1550-1700, which explores the distinctive style of dress popular in Spain and throughout the global Spanish Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries ($55,000).

Coby Foundation funding supported two exhibitions on the popular subject of quilts: Comfort and Community: 250 Years of Maine Quilts at the Maine State Museum in Augusta ($60,000), and Stitching the Revolution: Quilts as Agents of Change at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT ($20,000). Other projects included the Clark Art Institute’s (Williamstown, MA) dazzling exhibition Wall Power! Modern French Tapestry from the Mobilier national, Paris ($40,000); the Frick Collection’s To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum, showcasing extraordinary objects, including many textiles, from the Treasury in Jerusalem ($50,000); and America’s Tapestry, a community-based embroidery project and exhibition organized by Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, to commemorate the nation’s semiquincentennial ($20,000).

The largest grant, $80,000, went to the Greater Hudson Heritage Network, which funds conservation treatment for museums throughout New York State through its NYSCA/GHHN Conservation Grant Program. The grant will enable GHHN to expand its funding for at-risk textiles and will also support grantwriting workshops in upstate New York to encourage smaller organizations to seek funding for textiles.