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From NYC to D.C., print to digital, American Textile museum out 'to make noise'

From Lowellsun.com (http://www.lowellsun.com/news/ci_25745033/exhibit-by-exhibit-turning-heads (opens in a new window))

A museum focused on textiles isn't an institution for which buzz and notoriety might come naturally. Many of the American Textile History Museum's visitors stop by for research in the museum's sprawling library, and many others are local schoolchildren.

Being one of only 1 percent of American museums affiliated with the Smithsonian, and one of only five in Massachusetts, gives the textile museum credibility, but only to those who know about the connection.

But now the American Textile History Museum is getting its name out there.

Later this month, works from the textile museum's 1960s show, including garments and shoes, will be on display at New York's Grand Central Station. Other works from the museum's 2012 exhibit "Homefront & Battlefields," on quilts in the context of the Civil War, are being shown at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan. They'll soon travel to museums in Vermont and Nebraska.

This fall, the museum's curator and consulting curator will present at a fashion colloquium in Italy. Next year, it will take part in an exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

"I only wanted to come here if we were going to make a lot of noise," said Jonathan Stevens, the textile museum's president and CEO, who was previously a trustee.

Stevens' connection to the museum goes back long before being a trustee around a decade ago. His late father, Edward Brooks Stevens, once served as museum chairman. Caroline Rogers Stevens, who founded the museum in North Andover in 1960, is a great-aunt. Stevens also has textiles in his blood as the former president of the Ames Textiles Corp., a company that has been in his family for generations.

In other ways the museum is raising its profile, curator Karen Herbaugh was recruited by the Florida Institute of Technology to speak about an exhibition the museum featured last year on brides and bridal dresses. She's also been used by the University of Wisconsin as an expert to guide the school's textile collection, and has been asked to contribute a chapter to a book being produced by Kansas State University on the print collection of the Associated American Artists, a group that sold fabric prints.

A show accompanying the book will make its way to Lowell in 2016.

"All the things folks are doing here is raising awareness," Stevens said.

Attendance at the museum has also risen sharply since Stevens took over as head of the institution in late 2011.

In 2012, attendance rose about 20 percent to around 11,000. By 2013, it rose again to around 15,000.

A better name recognition for the museum could push those figures higher still.

Herbaugh and consulting curator Diane Fagan Affleck will talk at the fashion colloquium in Florence, Italy, alongside colleagues from places like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago. They'll talk about fashion from the 1890s, which they say is more colorful than many might realize.

"People seem to think all people wore was black or brown," Herbaugh said of the time period.

"Or just black and white -- what they see in photos," said David Unger, the museum's director of interpretation.

The textile museum will be one of only six museums across the country, all Smithsonian affiliates, to contribute to an exhibit next year called "Places of Invention," which will range from today's Silicon Valley to yesterday's Lowell, which was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Unger has been working on assembling three videos of about five minutes each to tell Lowell's story, and is basing that portion of the Smithsonian exhibit on the textile museum's former "Inventing Lowell" exhibit.

"We're looking at the city of Lowell itself as an invention," Unger said.

Another project is also on the horizon for the textile museum. 

The museum will be working with McGill University in Montreal on what is called the virtual textile project, in which the museum's massive collection of textiles will be digitized. It's a project the museum's staff of 11 full-time and eight part-time workers never would have been able to tackle on their own, Affleck said.

About 3,600 images will be included at the start, eventually reaching over 10,000.

The website the project is creating should be complete by the end of the summer, according to the museum. It will have two components: an open-access database for the public to browse and a commercial site in which clothing companies or others can pay for a license for textile pattern rights.