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Featured Textiles

Rug

Yardage

Karuselli

Wall Hanging

Teaching Subheader

 

OUR MISSION

 

The Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection furthers the understanding of human beings within their material and social environments through the study of textiles of artistic, cultural, and historic significance. Our mission is to provide educational resources both within the University and beyond.

Photo by Jeff Miller


The HLATC is primarily a teaching collection serving the School of Human Ecology’s Design Studies Department and other academic disciplines on campus such as the Material Culture program. Instructors schedule class visits for their students to view textiles and learn about them from both cultural and artistic perspectives, and students have access to pieces for individual research projects.

 

Under normal circumstances scholars and other visitors are welcome to contact the Collection to set up appointments to view textiles and/or access the HLATC database, but this is no longer possible due to our impending relocation. Over the next few years our holdings will be housed in an off-site storage facility and we will not be able to bring them out for study.

 

Mark Kenoyer, Silks of South Asia Lecuture

Photo by Doris Green
 We do hope to reopen to a limited extent once we are re-established in our temporary quarters in Sterling Hall in early 2010: database access will be restored, and we will be able to show roughly 180 pieces selected for what we’re calling our Interim Teaching Collection (ITC for short). Once we are settled in our new building in a few years we look forward to being able to host visitors of all kinds to the Collection again.

 

In the meantime, please explore our online exhibitions and essays on featured textiles elsewhere on this website.

 

class visit 1

Photo by Jeff Miller

 

Please visit on Inspiration page for articles about how people have been inspired by objects in our collection.

 

class visit 2

Photo by Jeff Miller

 

In July the Collection hosted a group of aspiring young fashion designers participating in the PEOPLE program.

 

PEOPLE is a pre-college pipeline for students of color and low-income students, most of whom are the first in their families to potentially attend college. Their journey prepares them to apply, be successfully admitted and enroll at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 People Program Visit

PEOPLE accepts highly motivated students into a rigorous program to build study skills, explore and strengthen academic and career interests, and gain a positive experience on a world-class campus.

 

Curator Maya Lea introduced these disadvantaged high-school students to the HLATC’s expanding array of electronic resources in the computer lab, then brought them upstairs for a tour. Their first stop was the cases exhibiting Dr. Mark Kenoyer’s raw silks from India. The students were thrilled to be able to touch the silk in various stages of processing from cocoon to fiber to finished luxury fabric, and they asked lots of questions.

 

Next they stopped off in the HLATC’s half-empty storage room to see how museums house costumes and textiles when they’re not on display. Lea showed them a few particular favorites of hers that hadn’t been packed yet, a Bonnie Cashin coat in a bold geometric fabric and its Central Asian ikat and embroidered cousins. After that the group looked in on the packing team hard at work in the staging area, piled high with boxes, to see how carefully the objects were handled and to meet the four students devoting their summer to this project under Assistant Curator Diana Zlatanovski’s direction.

 

That was to have concluded the students’ visit to the Collection, but they were still eager for more. So Lea shepherded them into her office, where they were fascinated by a sampler chart showing how Navaho weavers used natural materials to dye spun wool and then weave it into rugs. They were still buzzing with questions when they left. Lea was struck by how hungry these students were for contact with real objects, and how ready they were to think about those objects from multiple perspectives—both extremely encouraging. We hope to see these young women again as UW Design Studies undergraduates coming to use the Collection with their professors.