The Textile Museum isn’t one of Washington’s most well known attractions, though its collection includes some of the world’s finest examples of rugs and textiles from Asia, Africa, and the indigenous cultures of the Americas, some of which date back to 3000 BCE. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t near a metro?!
Well, that’s about to change.
This week, George Washington University announced an opening date for when The Textile Museum would join its campus (first announced in 2011). The Museum’s new 46,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art facility — that will also serve as an arts center on campus — is completing construction and textile collection transport, and has announced an opening date of March 21, 2015.
The new George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum is a custom-built, four-story museum structure on the corner of 21st and G streets NW that will display The Textile Museum’s globally recognized collection of more than 19,000 objects, pieces owned by GW and the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection of nearly 1,000 objects documenting the history of Washington.
It opens with three exhibitions: The Textile Museum’s largest exhibition to date, “Unraveling Identity: Our Textiles, Our Stories,” and “The Civil War
and the Making of Modern Washington” and “Seat of Empire: Planning Washington, 1790–1801”—two shows curated from the Washingtoniana collection.
The new museum also boasts a special gallery that will showcase Albert H. Small’s trove of historic Washington maps, documents and other rare treasures, a donation to the University in 2011.
*Photos courtesy of GW Today
