The Textile Museum of Canada is a museum located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting and recording information about textiles.
History
The Canadian Textile Museum was founded as the Canadian Carpet and Textile Museum in 1975 by Max Allen and Simon Wegemaker. Located above an ice cream store in the village of Mirvish, the museum’s collection was originally based only on textiles collected during business trips. The museum only moved to its current location in 1989.
Collection
The Canadian Textile Museum has a permanent collection of over 13,000 textiles from around the world. It, spanning 2,000 years of textile history, includes textiles, ceremonial fabrics, clothing, rugs, quilts and related artifacts.
The museum features displays of contemporary works as well as historical and ethnographic exhibits gathered from the museum director’s own accumulations and other people’s collections. It houses the N. N. Pullar Library, a reference collection of materials on non-industrial textiles. The museum also offers lectures, roundtables, workshops, music and dance performances, hands-on demonstrations, school programs, and public tours.
Canadian Tapestry: The Fabric of Cultural Diversity, one of the museum’s digitization projects provides online access to 7,000 items, and a second phase will provide access to an additional 3,500 items.
Several of the museum’s exhibits and publications have won numerous awards, including:
- Cloth and Clay: Communicating Cultures (2003)
- Canadian Tapestry: A Fabric of Wide Variety (2006)
- Terrible Beauty: An Installation (2006)
- Tor Hansen: Creating Canadian Style (2006)