Installation

DESIGN BEHIND THE SCENES: TEXTILE STORAGE

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has a world-renowned collection of more than 26,000 textiles spanning twenty-four centuries. When not on exhibition, each textile—whether a fragment from an ancient Peruvian mantle, an eighteenth-century lace cravat, or a twenty-first-century 3-D printed dress—is stored in a specially designed archival container that facilitates safe access for research and evaluation, as well as ensures the collection’s preservation for future generations.

This installation and video showing the meticulous care and exquisite packing of textiles for storage is a tribute to the designer of the system, Lucy Commoner, a conservator at the museum since 1977 before becoming Conservator Emerita this year. Commoner created a cohesive storage system that is flexible for a variety of object configurations and conditions. She designed six standard-size modular boxes that are constructed of archival materials chosen for their chemically stable quality and scaled to fit on a commercial shelving system. Commoner retrofitted the box interiors and developed custom-size boxes to accommodate the full range of textile objects in the collection. Cotton twill tape, linen thread, and hand-stitched embossed labels are used to secure and identify the textiles. While protecting the collection in storage, the multiple layers of packing are designed to inspire careful handling during the process of unpacking each piece. Essential to the success of her system is that conservation interns and volunteers can easily learn and execute the techniques. The storage system has been adopted by museums around the world, and Commoner’s boxes are recognized as fundamental to best practices in textile conservation.

Generous grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution Collections Care and Preservation Fund, and the Smithsonian Women’s Committee funded portions of the textile storage system.

For more information about how to care for textiles or find a conservator, please refer to Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute /MCI; American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works www.conservation-us.org; and the book, Conservation Concerns: A Guide for Collectors and Curators edited by Konstanze Bachmann (1992: Smithsonian Institution).