Museums - Textile Museum
Textile Museum
2320 S St. NW
Washington, DC, Washington, DC 20008
U.S.A.
 | Monday – Saturday, 10 a.m. –
5 p.m.; Sunday, 1 – 5 p.m. Museum hours are subject to change. Please contact museum before visiting to confirm the information listed is correct. |
The Textile Museum was founded in 1925 by collector George Hewitt Myers and is an international center for the exhibition, study, collection and preservation of textiles. The museum’s mission is to further understanding and appreciation of creative achievements in the textile arts.
The museum is housed in two historic buildings in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC. Visitors enter the museum through the former home of the museum’s founding family, which was designed by John Russell Pope in 1913.
The museum’s collections number more than 17,000 textiles and rugs dating from 3,000 BCE to the present, with special focus on Asia, Africa, and the indigenous cultures of the Americas. The collection includes one of the most important research collections of Oriental carpets, which is distinguished by both range and depth. The museum’s fifteenth–century Mamluk rugs from Egypt, Spanish carpets, and classical Indian carpet fragments are matched by no other museum in the world. The museum also has extraordinary holdings of pre-Hispanic Peruvian textiles. Styles that are particularly well represented include Ocucaje, Nasca, Huari, Chimu, Chancay, and Inca. In addition, the collection includes extensive holdings of textiles in the modern traditions that descend from pre-Hispanic origins, including those of Guatemala and Mexico, as well as the Andean countries of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. There is also a large collection of molas from Kuna Yala in Panama.
At the time of Myers’ death in 1957, his collection numbered 500 rugs and 3,500 textiles. Since then, the museum has broadened its holdings to better represent the full spectrum of non-Western textile arts. Many of the objects have come into the museum’s possession through donation by textile collectors around the world, and some have been acquired through museum purchase. The museum presents six to eight rotating exhibitions each year. The majority of exhibitions are drawn from its own collections. A small percentage of the entire collection is on view at any given time. Storage is not accessible to the general public; however, the collection is available for scholarly research.
Happenings
African art Exhibition
Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa
The textiles of the Kuba kingdom are among the most distinctive and spectacular works of African art. Emerging in the early 17th century, the Kuba kingdom grew into a powerful and wealthy confederation of 18 different ethnic groups located in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. While they have fascinated artists, collectors and designers for over a century, this will be the first major museum exhibition in the U.S. to showcase the artistic inventiveness and graphic power of Kuba ceremonial dance skirts within a wide-ranging survey of Kuba design. More than 140 exceptional 19th- and early 20th-century objects will be on view, including ceremonial skirts, ‘velvet’ tribute cloths, headdresses and basketry from the permanent collection of The Textile Museum, the National Museum of African Art, and several private collections.