Gossips, Garlands and Thirty-Four Cows: The Modern Folk Aesthetic of the Folly Cove Textile Designs

press release: The Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection is pleased to host Prof. Marina Moskowitz as its 2018 Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecturer. Prof. Marina Moskowitz is the Lynn and Gary Mecklenburg Chair in textiles, material culture and design in the School of Human Ecology. She has published and edited works on American material culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is currently co-editor of the journal Textile History.

During the 1940s through 1960s, in the small community of Folly Cove in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a network of artists and designers produced block-printed textiles for the mid-century American home. Drawing on the landscapes and cultural icons they saw around them in rural New England, the Folly Cove Designers often incorporated these everyday images into strikingly modern graphics. Started by Virginia Lee Burton, the writer and illustrator of popular children’s books, the Folly Cove Designers worked as a collective, critiquing one another’s work and encouraging attention to detail in design and craftsmanship. The Folly Cove Designers sought to bring fine art to the home, in their case primarily through hand-printed table linens; they also supplied designs to regional and national department stores and fabric companies. The discussion of the Folly Cove Designers will focus on examples collected by Helen Louise Allen and now housed in the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection.

This event is free and open to the public.

The annual Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecture was established in 1992 in honor of UW-Madison textiles professor and Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection curator, Ruth Harris.  It was designed to bring nationally-recognized artists and scholars in the field of textiles to the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection in order to share their expertise with the campus and broader community.