A Visit behind the Scenes - by Regina Marzlin

 

I was in Boston for our annual Art Cloth Network meeting a week ago. We held our meeting in this location to be able to take full advantage of the Boston Fiber Arts Symposium “Gather”, a month-long exploration of fiber art in the greater Boston area.

One of the events on offer was a behind-the-scenes tour at the Peabody Essex Museum storage facility in Rowley, Massachusetts. A group of about 20 interested attendees were welcomed by the museum staff and treated to a tour of the facility. It was refitted in 2017 from a toy storage facility to a state-of-the-art storage, research and preservation facility for the Peabody Essex Museum Collection.

We were able to go into the large storage room that houses the costume and textile collection. The pieces are stored hanging or lying flat in watertight, climate-controlled closets and many of them were opened for our viewing pleasure.

The historic garments are treated with care as a lot of them are fragile. The closets with newer collections included many designer names. The storage also houses a large portion of the late New York fashion icon Iris Apfel’s collection. It was so interesting to hear details about the history of some garments, to see the embroidery, the different fabrics and the innovative ideas of modern designers.

We also were allowed into the conservation lab where textile pieces were repaired and conserved. The conservationist was working on a Hawaiian bark cloth garment and other bark cloth items. She told us a bit about the history and making of this particular plant fiber and the resulting cloth.

Lastly, we were invited into the Phillips Library that houses several hundred thousand books and over a linear mile of archival materials The head librarian showed us some of the textile related books in this collection. Some were sample books that traveling merchants would show to their clientele.

The tour was a visual feast and very inspiring. As most of the collection of the Peabody Museum is in storage and not on display at the actual Museum, it was great to be able to peek behind the scenes.