April Member Spotlight on Coby Foundation

In April our photo banner will feature projects and exhibitions supported by GIA member The Coby Foundation, Ltd. Located in New York City, the foundation funds projects in the textile and needle art fields throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Below, Coby Foundation executive director Ward Mintz, describes the outset of the foundation and its 2012 grantees:

When Irene Silverman, the benefactor of the Coby Foundation, died tragically in 1998, she had already established her foundation. It was named Coby in honor of her late mother, who Mrs. Silverman called the “finest needlewoman in New York.” Mrs. Silverman had already asked friends at Columbia University to help her with the Foundation and, after her death, they, along with her lawyer, applied themselves to the task of honing a mission that respected Mrs. Silverman’s wishes.  They created the one foundation in the United States that supports only projects in textiles and needle arts. And to give their grantmaking greater impact, they limited their funding to institutions in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

The Coby Foundation mission also specifies that all projects must have a public benefit. That translates into museum exhibitions, scholarly publications, and public programs. In the past dozen or so years of making grants, the Foundation has supported projects at seventy-four institutions for a total of nearly $4 million. The 2012 group of fascinating Coby-funded projects is representative of the Foundation’s broad subject interests—any era or culture as long as it’s in the field of textiles and needle arts.

Last year the Foundation supported primarily exhibitions. One examines the phenomenon of the dandy and his impact on men’s fashion over the past two centuries. It will be at the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and will examine figures from Beau Brummel, Regency England’s arbiter of fashion, to designer Ouigi Theodore, present-day Brooklyn’s bearded dandy. It also funded Queer Style: From the Closet to the Catwalk, the first exhibition and publication to explore, in depth, the significant historical contributions to fashion made by gay men and lesbians. It opens at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology this coming fall.

The impact of the textile trade on global design and commerce over three centuries will be the subject of a Coby-funded exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, also this coming fall. And one of those influential textile-producing locations, Istanbul, was the subject of The Sultan’s Garden:The Blossoming of Ottoman Art, an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington. It examined the sudden emergence, from the royal design workshop, of a floral style in the mid 16th century, which was adopted and adapted by artists and designers throughout the Ottoman Empire.

The Foundation supported two projects important to Maine history and culture. Woodlawn Museum and Gardens in Ellsworth was awarded funding for an ambitious project to preserve of one of the oldest and most significant upholstered beds in the United States, which remains in the very same room where it was first installed in 1827. The Saco Museum received a grant for an exhibition and catalogue that examine the role of needlework samplers in the education of girls in northern New England in the Federal Era.

The Foundation is committed to funding contemporary art projects and gave a major grant to Bound and Unbound: Lin Tianmiao, at the Asia Society in New York, which presented the work of one of the few women to achieve fame in the Chinese art world. Coby funds are also being applied to a site-specific installation this spring by Orly Genger, who will use 1.4 million feet of layered, painted, and knotted rope in Madison Square Park in Manhattan. Contemporary quilts are among the items featured in Beyond the Bed: The American Quilt Evolution at The Katonah Museum in Westchester County, which traces the evolution of the North American quilt – in form, fashion, and function – from the beginning of the 19th century to the present day.

More years of Coby-funded projects are available under “Past Grants” on our website.

Photo: Marking sampler by Sarah Jane Patch (1819-1847), 1827. Probably worked in Otisfield, Maine, silk thread on linen, 7 x 17.5 in., Courtesy of Natalie Larson. This sampler, which memorializes George Washington, is currently on view in I My Needle Ply with Skill: Maine Schoolgirl Needlework of the Federal Era at the Saco Museum in Saco, Maine.