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.