Throughout the Museum's season there will be a series of fascinating talks and workshops supporting the exhibition, starting with a talk on 16 April by Edwina Ehrman, Curator of Fashion & Textiles at the Victoria & Albert Museum who curated their hugely successful exhibition of wedding dresses. The Fabric of Memory is a special exhibition at the American Museum resulting from a year-long collaborative project with Bath Spa University’s Mixed Media Textiles, exploring the theme of textiles and memory, running from Tuesday 26 until Sunday 31 May.
Hatched, Matched, Dispatched – and Patched! American Life in Literature, Art and Film is a ten-week course with Dr Allan Phillipson, analysing the changes in American life over the last 100 years and, touching on representations of the family and marriage in art and film. Many of us have a box full of precious objects and collected ephemera. Join artist Kate Crossley for a workshop on 9 May to create a cabinet of curiosities to bring your much loved objects together. For details of these and other interesting talks and workshops, visit www.americanmuseum.org.
Selvedge magazine is teaming up with Bath in Fashion to bring you the Selvedge Spring Fair, showcasing an exclusive selection of 30 makers offering a host of antique textiles, fashion, home-ware, and haberdashery, all in the beautiful surroundings of the American Museum. You can view a full list of exhibitors here. The Selvedge Spring Fair, March 28, 2015 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Spirit Hawk Eye: A Celebration of American Native Culture is another exhibit on display. Celebrating contemporary Native American culture, ‘Spirit Hawk Eye’ is a series of portraits by photographer Heidi Laughton that highlight the present-day customs of the Native peoples of California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
New World, Old Maps: In 1988 Dr. Dallas Pratt, co-founder of the American Museum in Britain, gave the Museum over 200 Renaissance maps of the New World — a collection acclaimed by scholars as one of the finest holdings of rare printed world maps in existence. Dr. Pratt recollected when he first caught what he called the 'map bug':
I bought my first sixteenth-century map in 1932. It was the summer before I entered Yale, and I was in Paris with a friend. Strolling past bookstalls which line the left bank of the Seine, my eye was caught by three quaint and colourful maps. One was of the world, with fat-cheeked wind-puffers, one of the western hemisphere with a cannibal’s ‘lunch’ dangling from a Brazilian woodpile, and the third depicted an upside-down Europe with south at the top.
Who could resist?
Spurred on by thoughts of treasure, European cartographers changed the shape of the 'New World' as they mapped the Americas from the 15th to 17th centuries. Medieval maps had illustrated theology rather than geography; the Renaissance revived the classical discipline of scientifically mapping land mass. The pursuit of accuracy was entirely practical: only by exact measurement could the rich New World territories be claimed, plundered, and ruled by their Old World conquerors.
The American Museum in Britain, located close to the city of Bath, was established to inform visitors about the cultural history of the United States, strengthening the bond of understanding between the two nations. Thousands of decorative items are on display in a series of Period Rooms that tell the story of the history of the United States from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries including one of the finest collections of American quilts in the world. Set on 125 acres, the Museum has spectacular grounds with an outdoor terrace offering sweeping views across the Limpley Stoke Valley — an area of outstanding natural beauty.
Editor's Note: As a knitter from the age of five, we couldn't overlook the recently closed exhibit, The Colourful World of Kaffe Fassett. We have on our kitchen wall, a wonderful object from his now-closed shop in Bath. But you can visit his site, of course, Kaffe Fassett Studio, for fabrics, patchwork, needlepoint and knitting projects.
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