Gallery - Textiles

Curatrix Group and its principal, Melissa Leventon, have organized more than 40 exhibitions and installations for art, history, and special focus museums. Here in the gallery are several of our more recent projects, along with some older favorites.

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True Couture: The Wearable Art of Kaisik Wong
	Kaisik Wong was a San Franciscan whose work encompassed fashion design, wearable art, photography, and performance art. This 38-object exhibition was based on original research and loans drawn from private collections across the U.S., and showcased the full range and span of Wong’s work.

Artwear: Fashion and Anti-Fashion
	The exhibition of nearly 140 costumes highlighted the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's fine permanent collection of wearable art and also included pieces from 60 lenders from the U.S and abroad. The show charted the development of the artwear genre from embroidered and crocheted hippie style, to grand, one-of-a-kind woven, knitted, and dyed garments that are equally at home on the body and on the wall, to the more fashion-oriented works of the 1990s.

Salad Dressing
	This exhibition was conceived for Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts and explored the intersection of two loaded subjects: clothing and food. Food as a subject in fashion offered unparalleled opportunities for wit and playfulness, and allowed fashion to adopt the language and imagery of art movements to which food is important, like Surrealism and Pop Art. The exhibition of approximately 95 costumes and photographs, presented a varied menu, from decorous, pepper-trimmed headgear to dresses that coated their wearers in ice cream, soup, or salad. And it was one meal that museum-goers could consume without fear; it was high in fiber and the calories didn't count.

Fashion, Flappers ‘n’ All That Jazz
	Drawn from the rich costume collection of the Chicago Historical Society, this exhibition featured over 60 costumes and accessories installed into period settings recreating a night on the town during Chicago’s Jazz Age. Music from the period set the mood; videos incorporating historic footage, produced jointly by the museum and The History Channel, highlighted important events and showed clothes of the period in motion.

Recent Acquisitions: Contemporary Fiber and Art to Wear
	This unusual exhibition focused on two distinct but related aspects of modern art textiles – contemporary fiber and wearable art. The show highlighted the fruits of a decade of collecting by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Embroidered for the Church
	This single-gallery show was part of a regular series of small thematic installations from a varied permanent collection. Featured objects included copes, chasubles, chalice veils, and altar frontals from the 16th-19th centuries.

Jean Lurçat: Le Chant du Monde Tapestries
	The medieval Apocalypse tapestry series inspired Lurçat’s monumental post-WWII weavings about the dangers of the atomic age. With the permission of Mme. Lurçat, a loom was set up in the gallery and professional tapestry weavers wove a detail from one of the tapestries in the series during the exhibition.