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Thinking Through Textiles:  The Milton Sonday Archive at the MET

(originally published in Textiles: Cloth and Culture, Volume 17, Issue 1, 2019)

Only a great teacher can elucidate a concept so well so as to make it seem self-evident:  this is the genius of Milton Sonday. In The Secret Life of Textiles:  The Milton Sonday Archive, a fourth iteration in an exhibition series about textiles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art pays tribute to Sonday’s didacticism. While the first three installments of the series explored fiber properties, this fourth installment – materials from Sonday’s archive, which he donated to the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Met in 2012 – addresses textile construction, particularly that of lace and woven fibers.

Sonday began his career as a draftsman in 1962, working for the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.  Shortly thereafter he rose to the position of assistant curator – a title he carried on to the Cooper Hewitt Museum in 1967, where he worked for another 30 years, becoming the Curator of Textiles in 1977. Today it is common to encounter an artist’s studio in a museum display or the recreation of an idiosyncratic exhibition, such as those by the notorious Swiss curator, Harald Szeemann. Rarer is the exhibition of a curator’s archive. Curators who showcase work(spaces) of artists or auteurs tend to underscore them as visionaries. Sonday, however, doesn’t illustrate a world we lack imagination to perceive; he illuminates a reality we cannot possibly see.

Take for instance Sonday’s diagrams and models of bobbin lace. Before modern video technology, it would have been almost impossible for the general public to understand how a bobbin-lace maker worked just by witnessing his/her actions or studying a piece of lace at length. Sonday found a simple solution in the absence of slow-motion filming. In six successive models, he utilizes a dense white rope – not the thin string common in bobbin lace – to enlarge the multitude of crossovers and twists found in even the tiniest pieces of lace (fig. 1). To make lace, one typically uses several different bobbins or fiber strands, but because of their uniform color it is extremely difficult to see how each fiber works in relationship to the others. Sonday solves this problem in drawing diagrams of lace patterns, where he assigns each string a different color, allowing viewers to follow the path of one fiber throughout an entire lace pattern. The result is a new appreciation for a single twist within the whole construction; perhaps, also, a renewed affection for shoelace tying.

One of the main reasons for the marginalization of weaving in histories of art and craft concerns the abstract relationship between the object and its making. In ceramics, for example, it’s easy enough for non-specialists to comprehend changes to vessels’ forms by considering ceramicists’ hand movements (among other tools). In weaving, changes to the form of a material are achieved by complex hand and tool movements. The myriad components of looms, additionally, impede one’s ability to see how a single fiber moves throughout the loom. As a curator, trying to make weaving more accessible to the general public, Sonday understood these obstacles better than anyone. He craftily devised miniature looms with color-coded parts suspended in action (fig. 2). Viewed in full, all components are seen at once, making the interrelationship between parts and the movements of a single thread clearer.

That Sonday saw weaving as technology, rather than a means to making fabric, is most apparent in his recent work which draws on the language of digital imaging. In four photographs, we see his face printed in grayscale (fig. 3). Each photograph has been cut in narrow strips, then glued to Plexiglas rods, and placed on the outline of warp threads in a diagram of a woven pattern. The effect mimics low resolution or pixilation. Zoom in to any digitally-made image and place an inch of fabric under a magnifying glass and you’ll find patches of interlocked, monochromatic squares – TPI (Threads Per Inch), DPI (Dots Per Inches), and PPI (Pixels Per Inch) are essentially all the same thing, codes for imaging. Zoom out of a digital/textile inch, imagery becomes visible again. Sonday’s photo-strip project maintains this tension between seeing the image and seeing its construction. One of weaving’s top secrets is, of course, it’s dual suitability for visual representation and building.

In Interlace after Pieter Coecke van Aelst and an anonymous lace designer (2015), Sonday reaches an artistic pinnacle (fig. 4). Shredding two prints – one, a copy of a tapestry by the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst showing a nude maiden and another, a copy of a lace pattern bearing a knight on a horse – he then weaves their strips together, treating one set as warp and the other as weft. The result yields a magical narrative. The maiden’s dreamy gaze fixates on the knight, appearing as if a hallucination in front of her. Patches of lace cover her body, as if she has cloaked herself in her own daydream. As viewers, we again find ourselves lost in the maze of seeing and believing: as weaving suspends illusionism, it reignites theatricality. With Interlace, Sonday leaves us to wonder how, for over two centuries, the decorative arts were ever split from fine art – a question redressed by postmodern art and the Met in its exhibition of an unforgettable curator’s research. The show is on view until December 31, 2018.

Figure 1: Six bobbin-lace models, one interlace diagram, and one interlace diagram, one interlace model. Cotton string, steel pins, ink, pigment. The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of The Met.

Figure 2: Models of hand looms. The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of The Met.

Figure 3:  Four self-portraits on twill weave, 2010. Paper strips and Plexiglas rods. The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of The Met.

Figure 4:  Interlace after Pieter van Aelst and an anonymous lace designer, 2015. Paper strips. The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of The Met.

Figure 5:  Installation shot. The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of The Met.