 Entrance to the Textile Museum of Canada | |
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| Established | 1975 |
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| Location | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Coordinates | 43°39′17″N79°23′12″W / 43.6546°N 79.3868°W |
| Type | Textile museum |
| Visitors | 29,190 [1] |
| Director | Kirsten Kamper [2] |
| Public transit access |  St. Patrick |
| Website | textilemuseum.ca |
The Textile Museum of Canada, located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is a museum dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and documentation of textiles.
The Textile Museum of Canada was founded as the Canadian Museum of Carpets and Textiles in 1975 by Max Allen and Simon Waegemaekers. Located above an ice cream shop in Mirvish Village the museum's collection was initially based on textiles collected during business trips. The museum relocated to its current location as in 1989. It now includes exhibitions of international contemporary art, craft, and design. It recently acknowledged the history of the land, stating on their homepage, "The Textile Museum of Canada operates on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat." [3] [4] [5]
The Textile Museum of Canada has a permanent collection of more than 15,000 textiles from around the world. Covering 2,000 years of textile history, the collection includes fabrics, ceremonial cloths, garments, carpets, quilts and related artifacts. [4] [6]
The museum presents curated exhibitions of contemporary work and historic and ethnographic artifacts drawn from its own and others’ collections. [7] It is home to the H.N. Pullar Library, a reference collection of material focused on non-industrial textiles. [8] [9] The museum also offers lectures, round-table discussions, workshops, music and dance performances, hands-on demonstrations, school programs and public tours.
Canadian Tapestry: The Fabric of Cultural Diversity, one of the museum’s digitization projects, provides online access to 7,000 artifacts and a second phase will provide access to an additional 3,500 items.
Several of the museum's exhibits and publications have won multiple awards, including:
The Museum is affiliated with: CMA, CHIN, and Virtual Museum of Canada. [12]
Weaving is a method of textile production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. Other methods are knitting, crocheting, felting, and braiding or plaiting. The longitudinal threads are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft, woof, or filling. The method in which these threads are interwoven affects the characteristics of the cloth. Cloth is usually woven on a loom, a device that holds the warp threads in place while filling threads are woven through them. A fabric band that meets this definition of cloth can also be made using other methods, including tablet weaving, back strap loom, or other techniques that can be done without looms.
A rug is a piece of cloth, similar to a carpet, but it does not span the width of a room and is not attached to the floor. It is generally used as a floor covering, or as a decorative feature. Rug making is the process of crafting a rug from various textile materials. Historically, there has been a variety of methods of rug making, including braiding, hooking, and weaving. These processes can be carried out by hand, using smaller tools like a latch hook, or using a weaving machine. Rag rugs are a historically notable and widespread form of hooked rug making. Rug hooking is both an art and a craft where rugs are made by pulling loops of yarn or fabric through a stiff woven base such as burlap, linen, or rug warp. The loops are pulled through the backing material by using a crochet-type hook mounted in a handle for leverage.
The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is a museum of art, world culture and natural history in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is one of the largest museums in North America and the largest in Canada. It attracts more than one million visitors every year, making the ROM the most-visited museum in Canada. The museum is north of Queen's Park, in the University of Toronto district, with its main entrance on Bloor Street West. Museum subway station is named after the ROM and, since a 2008 renovation, is decorated to resemble the institution's collection at the platform level.
Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labor on the part of the artist as part of the works' significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875) was a furnishings and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer founded by the artist and designer William Morris with friends from the Pre-Raphaelites. With its successor Morris & Co. (1875–1940) the firm's medieval-inspired aesthetic and respect for hand-craftsmanship and traditional textile arts had a profound influence on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century.
Frank Havrah "Kaffe" Fassett, MBE is an American-born, British-based artist who is best known for his colourful designs in the decorative arts—needlepoint, patchwork, knitting, painting and ceramics. While still a child, Fassett renamed himself after an Egyptian boy character from the book Boy of the Pyramid by Ruth Fosdick Jones. His name rhymes with 'safe asset'.
The Quilt of Belonging is a collaborative textile arts project initiated by Canadian artist Esther Bryan.
John Henry Dearle was a British textile and stained-glass designer trained by the artist and craftsman William Morris who was much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dearle designed many of the later wallpapers and textiles released by Morris & Co., and contributed background and foliage patterns to tapestry designs featuring figures by Edward Burne-Jones and others. Beginning in his teens as a shop assistant and then design apprentice, Dearle rose to become Morris & Co.'s chief designer by 1890, creating designs for tapestries, embroidery, wallpapers, woven and printed textiles, stained glass, and carpets. Following Morris's death in 1896, Dearle was appointed Art Director of the firm, and became its principal stained glass designer on the death of Burne-Jones in 1898.
The Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries (GOG), formerly Ontario Association of Art Galleries / Association Ontarienne des Galeries d’Art (OAAG/AOGA), was established in 1968 to encourage development of public art galleries, art museums, community galleries and related visual arts organizations in Ontario, Canada. It was incorporated in Ontario in 1970, and registered as a charitable organization. It is a successor organization to the Southern Ontario Gallery Group founded in 1947, renamed the Art Institute of Ontario in 1952. In December of 2020 Ontario Association of Art Galleries / Association Ontarienne des Galeries d’Art (OAAG/AOGA) rebranded to the name Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries (GOG) which included new brand identity, logo, and website to better serve art organizations in Ontario and Canada.
Marion Boulton Stroud, also known as Marion Stroud Swingle was an American curator, author, and museum director who was particularly active in her support of contemporary art, and of the use of textiles as a medium. She was the founder and director of The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a trustee and active supporter of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is commonly referred to as "Kippy".
Dorothy Caldwell is a Canadian fibre artist. Her work consists primarily of abstract textile based wall hangings that utilize techniques such as wax-resist, discharge dyeing, stitching, mark-making, and appliqué.
Helen Frances Gregor was a Czechoslovakian-Canadian artist who specialised in textile art.
Helena Hernmarck is a Swedish tapestry artist who lives and works in the United States. She is best known for her monumental tapestries designed for architectural settings.
Martha Cole is a Canadian artist. She is known for her work with textiles, landscape, and artist's books, addressing themes of inter-contentedness, sustainability, and protection of ecological diversity. She currently resides in Disley, Saskatchewan. Cole's high school art teacher, Helmut Becker encouraged her to pursue a career in art. She was an instructor in the Extension Division, Fine Arts and Humanities, University of Regina.
Margaretha Reichardt, also known as Grete Reichardt, was a textile artist, weaver, and graphic designer from Erfurt, Germany. She was one of the most important designers to emerge from the Bauhaus design school's weaving workshop in Dessau, Germany. She spent most of her adult life running her own independent weaving workshop in Erfurt, which was under Nazi rule and then later part of communist East Germany.
Joan Livingstone is an American contemporary artist, educator, curator, and author based in Chicago. She creates sculptural objects, installations, prints, and collages that reference the human body and bodily experience.
William Morris (1834-1898), a founder of the British Arts and Crafts movement, sought to restore the prestige and methods of hand-made crafts, including textiles, in opposition to the 19th century tendency toward factory-produced textiles. With this goal in mind, he created his own workshop and designed dozens of patterns for hand-produced woven and printed cloth, upholstery, and other textiles.
Mary Zicafoose is an American textile artist, weaver, and teacher who specializes in ikat, an ancient technique in which threads are wrapped, tied and resist-dyed before weaving. Zicafoose is the author of Ikat: The Essential Handbook to Weaving Resist-Dyed Cloth (2020). Her works are part of private and public collections, including at least 16 embassies around the world as part of the U.S. Art in Embassies Program.
Krystyna Sadowska (1912-2000) was a contemporary artist from Lubin, Poland known for her metalwork statues, ceramics and tapestries. Her work can be found in the collections of the AGO, The Art Gallery of Windsor, The Government of Ontario Art Collection, and many more.
Barbara Fischer is an art curator and writer who specializes in contemporary art in all media with an emphasis on sculpture, installation, and projection/lens-based work. The Toronto Star called her the "unassuming nuclear reactor of the Toronto arts scene", adding that she is "doing seemingly impossible work that, at the same time, is both vital and otherwise neglected: building a memory bank of artistic expression in a city plagued with willful amnesia."
Media related to Textile Museum of Canada at Wikimedia Commons
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