Textile Museum of Canada tries new approach to engage the communities it reflects | Canada Voices

Recent programming at the Textile Museum of Canada has included a queer craft social for the LGBTQ community, a mending station inspired by Nigerian struggles with clothing waste and a workshop for making beaded earrings.

The museum, something of a sleeper institution hidden away in a condo building in downtown Toronto, is in the midst of a rethink. Long supported by an enthusiastic group of crafters, collectors and volunteers, the small institution has often been neglected by the larger arts community, partly because it lacks street presence let alone a splashy building. Yet its collection includes thousands of precious garments, hangings and rugs from around the world, and the museum is increasingly reaching out beyond those holdings to the communities they reflect.

A current show devoted to the Nigerian artist Samuel Nnorom, who makes soft sculptures from African fabrics, includes the museum’s own examples of 20th-century Nigerian textiles. Another exhibition imports modern Mayan paintings and sculptures from Guatemala and juxtaposes them with historic weaving from the collection. Meanwhile, the museum has flattened its administration, and hired a new co-director/curator.

“Our museum is a different beast,” said Armando Perla, who joined the Textile Museum as chief curator in mid-2023 and added co-director to that role last September after the departure of executive director Kirsten Kamper. “I’m not an art curator; I’m a human-rights curator.”

Perla shares the director’s role with chief operating officer Mab Coates-Davies, who has played various roles at the museum since 2018, as it experiments with a co-directorship more common in the performing arts. Previously Perla worked as chief curator for the City of Toronto’s history museums and also spent eight years at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg around its opening in 2014. There, staff had to fashion narratives without the benefit of an existing collection: Perla, who trained as a human-rights lawyer, learnt the importance of objects if you want to tell stories.

The Textile Museum has objects, lots of them: The collection boasts about 15,600 artifacts covering 200 regions and 2,000 years of history including an ancient Nazca head cloth found in Peru, a Ming dynasty wall hanging from China and fabrics printed with Inuit graphics in the 1960s. Most of these artifacts were collected by white Canadian connoisseurs attracted by their beauty or rarity. Perla’s idea is to add a lot of local context beyond the aesthetic power of the textiles.

“This museum was built on the donations of incredible people who went and travelled around the world acquiring things. Regardless of them being so generous, a lot of these items were selected based solely on the taste of these individuals. … It’s the white gaze,” he said, explaining efforts to add contributions by artists and academics from the places where the artifacts originate. “We’re trying to add another layer. We’re trying to bring the knowledge of those makers, the knowledge of those community members, that can tell us: ‘Well, yes, this is beautiful, but it also means this and this … and I relate to this, or my community relates to this item, in this way.’”

Beyond the Vanishing Maya, which opened in October, was organized by Diego Ventura Puac-Coyoy, a curator of Mayan ancestry from the city of Chichicastenango in the Guatemalan highlands who built the show around his family’s art collection. It includes pieces of traditional weaving from the museum’s own collection, most of it dating from the mid- to late 20th century, but places them alongside paintings and sculptures by named artists, both recent and current. The point is to depict Mayan culture as living and to elevate its creations beyond mere handicraft. One of the most telling works is by Diego Isaías Hernández Méndez, in which he offers a realistic portrait of himself in the act of painting an aerial view of stylized folk figures flattened by a hurricane: He knows how to paint like a European, he just chooses not to.

The exhibition devoted to Nigeria’s Nnorom features 11 of his distinctive soft sculptures made from dozens of little stuffed bindles – those bag-on-a-stick packages carried by the archetypal hobo – that have been lent to the museum by Art Mûr, the private gallery in Montreal. Nnorom uses off-cuts of ankara, the brightly coloured Dutch wax prints so firmly associated with West African fashion. The pieces seem to take the shape of islands, continents or fishing nets, and include Meeting Points of 2023, a gathering of yellow and blue bindles strung together on rope, which the museum has just acquired.

Staffers Julia Brucculieri and Raven Spiratos, who curated the show, recount the textiles’ history by adding examples from Nigeria and Java: The Dutch tried to introduce their industrial textiles to their Indonesian colonies but the locals preferred their own batik. African markets, on the other hand, happily adopted the style of these bright prints and launched a local industry.

Any textile history in Africa is complicated by Okrika, the flood of second-hand clothing that arrives in bales from the West, squeezing out local production and adding to global textile waste, issues also covered by the exhibition. The garments, named for the port city where they arrive and also known as “bend down select,” are sold at thrift markets, but it is estimated that 40 per cent of each bale is pure waste. Meanwhile, the museum has set up a mending station beside the show that encourages visitors to repair favourite garments – and save them from landfill. It already runs a popular textile reuse program that sells donated second-hand fabrics and supplies, and has diverted almost 7,000 kilograms from waste since 2021.

“This new direction is also based on the legacy of the museum as a space that has always engaged with community differently than other much larger organizations,” Coates-Davies said. “Our size enables us to be quite nimble. From the get-go, the founders of the museum, they didn’t want textiles to be behind glass in the gallery.”

The museum wound up sharing a building with the Chestnut Park condos and hotel on Centre Street, behind Nathan Phillips Square, owing to a 1989 density deal brokered by developer Fred Baida, himself an enthusiastic collector who also gave hundreds of pieces to the museum. The museum, which celebrates its 50th anniversary later this year, started in 1975 above a storefront on Markham Street, and remains small even for a boutique museum. It operates on about a quarter of the budget of the Gardiner Museum of ceramics and about half of the Bata Shoe Museum’s. With prominent buildings in a cultural corridor, both those institutions see more than 76,000 visits annually to their galleries and programs, while the Textile Museum, which used to welcome 32,000, has struggled since the pandemic and now only posts attendance of 15,000 partly owing to reducing its hours.

The museum lacks street presence with a tiny lobby next door to the condos’ own entrance, it doesn’t have an industrial kitchen for events and it could use some accessibility improvements: This winter, it faces a closure of several months to replace an aging elevator. On the other hand, it is conveniently located near the St. Patrick subway station and blessed with large exhibition spaces on two floors. It stores the collection, weighing more than 18,000 kilograms, above that, on the reinforced fourth floor, and plans to add Indigenous, African-Canadian and Caribbean work that is currently lacking, with weight restrictions needed to be taken into account.

For now, a new building that might solve these issues is merely a pipe dream: Coates-Davies’s more immediate goal is better signage in the subway directing visitors her way.