Saturday, 4 December 2004 | Levent OZLER
Hella Jongerius Selects
Works from the Permanent Collection
Dutch designer Hella Jongerius will guest curate an exhibition of samplers and related objects in the third collection rotation in the Nancy and Edwin Marks Gallery at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, on view March 4 through Sept. 4, 2005.
“Hella Jongerius Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection” showcases a select group of samplers from the museum’s collection of over 1,000 samplers from Great Britain, Europe and the Americas, and related objects from all four curatorial departments and the library, including embroidery tools, embroidery design drawings, wallcoverings featuring embroidery motifs, and penmanship and needlework books.
Jongerius is intrigued by samplers, which embody the concepts of process, trial and error, order, repetition, memory, hand craftsmanship and language—ideas that the designer explores in her own works. Inspired by the sampler collection, Jongerius has designed original textiles for the exhibition, which incorporate motifs from the museum’s sampler collection and pairs the craftsmanship of embroidery with contemporary needle-punch techniques. Her personal approach will also be evident in the innovative installation, which will display many of the objects in their original museum storage containers, a reference to the museum’s process of preserving and organizing its collection.
Samplers began in Europe as a medium to record and exchange embroidery designs and techniques for later reference and inspiration. Early samplers were often carefully kept from one generation to the next as a repository of skills, knowledge and design. Following the publication of the first pattern books in the early 16th century, the purpose of the sampler shifted from a means of keeping records to an exercise in domestic skills for school-aged girls. A schoolgirl’s sampler often began with embroidering the letters of the alphabet, as shown in the ca. 1800 sampler by 11-year-old Lucy Lathrop featured in the exhibition.
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