Mission Accomplished

We did it! The Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection relocation has been completed. So many people worked so hard on this project and I just want to say thank you thank you thank you for everyone's help. We couldn't have done it without you.

Blueprint Fine Art Services did a beautiful job crating and boxing our oversized pieces. The force behind the relocation, C. Coakley, did a great job and were an absolute pleasure to work with. Rich Reinke, Coakley's on-site leader for our move, was integral to the relocation going as smoothly as it did and he without a doubt deserves a round of applause. Particularly for maintaining a positive attitude for weeks on end!

I suppose I should also say thanks to mother nature for limiting the blizzards to non-move days. You've got to love these midwestern winters!

I will have many more photos of the move process as well as our new spaces just as soon as I find the box I packed the flash card reader into...

Things are movin'

Hello! Wow, has it really been almost a month since my last post? My apologies. As you might guess, things have gotten really busy around here. December 11th officially kicked off the HLATC move and we've made some amazing progress. I will have some great updates (with photos!) to share with you all very soon, so please stay tuned!

In the News

All photos in this post by Jeff Miller

The HLATC move was recently covered in the story, A World of Textiles, a Sea of Boxes by Wisconsin Week. A big thank you to Susannah Brooks for writing the story and to Jeff Miller for the photography. Jeff came by the day we were packing the opera quilt into a box, so you can get a sense of just how large that piece really is!

Rolled Textiles

As you can tell from my less frequent posts, things are really getting busy around here! Prep work has begun for moving approximately 1,500 rolled textiles that are currently stored within cabinets. Here you can see Rich and Matt from C. Coakley working in storage.




The plan is to secure all of the rolled pieces onto their current storage racks and move the racks intact. First, those red plastic caps are inserted into the ends of the rods, eliminating the little bit of space between the rod and the bracket, so now it fits very snugly. Cable ties then secure the rod onto its brackets and the brackets onto the frame.



There are also "bumpers" being created from archival storage tubes cut to specific sizes. Those will be placed between the rolled textiles and the ends of the rod, eliminating any horizontal movement of the textiles. The racks will then be slid onto custom created rolling carts for transport. Once the cabinets are reinstalled into our new storage space, the racks will slide right back into their cabinets. Pretty creative, eh?

Opera quilt

HLATC E1242A, Opera quilt, France, 1897-1900


Intricately embroidered vignettes decorate the front of this European bedspread, which dates to the turn of the 19th century. The amazingly detailed embroidery is credited to the hands of six French nuns, who worked diligently on the piece for three years. The level of detail is so fine that a few of the embroidered women are actually wearing real beaded necklaces.

This impressively sized bedspread (10 ft x 9 ft) is called an Opera Quilt because the scenes depicted on it are from operas playing around the time the quilt was made. The six operas represented: Boheme-1896, Manon-1884, Aida-1871, Cavall Rustice-1890 (Cavalieria Rusticana), Tosca-1900, and Strategia Damore-1896. The images used for the opera 'Tosca' were copied from a series of promotional postcards printed in Italy, probably the year of the premier, 1900. It is likely the other images are also copied from similar postcards.

The quilt is said to have won first prize at the World's Fair in Paris in November of 1900. This gives us some insight into the year the piece was created, as we know that it was finished no later than 1900. Also, since the opera Tosca did not premier until the year 1900, it is likely the quilt was begun earlier and the last vignette added was of Tosca, in 1900.

Archaeological Textiles

WFSA3091, Chancay, Peru, 1100-1400A.D.

These incredible archaeological textiles from Peru are among the oldest pieces in the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection. The fragment shown above, WFSA3091, is absolutely breathtaking in person. The image has not been enhanced in any way, this is the true color of the textile. Dating to between 1100-1400A.D., this slit tapestry weave fragment was woven on a backstrap loom, likely by a member of the Chancay culture in the Central Coast area of Peru. Textiles are among the most fragile of artifacts, making it truly remarkable for pieces this old to have even survived, much less retained the vibrant colors of their natural dyes.


WFAS3091 detail


WFAS 3091 detail


WFSA1848, Peru, 1000-1476A.D.


1996.1.2, Paracas, Peru, 600B.C-200A.D.


WFSA3094, Chancay, Peru, 1000-1476A.D.

In the eighties

If only I was talking about the weather. Fall has descended here in the Midwest, which means it is 50 degrees and raining. It also means we have almost arrived at our big move date! The collection is now eighty percent packed. EIGHTY!! This is great news. And secretly (or not so secretly, since I'm posting it on a blog) we are actually further ahead than the numbers indicate. You might remember from my previous post that we have a significant number of rolled textiles that will not be boxed and therefore aren't being counted in our tallies. So, our progress is actually closer to 90%. Add in the handful of pieces that we are having custom boxes and/or crates built for by fine arts shippers and my goodness we're just about done! Ofcourse, it is always that last 10% that seems to take the longest, so we're not claiming victory just yet.

Here you can see Tara working with some of the rolled textiles that will actually be boxed. We are sorting them by size to make securing them within a box a little easier.