The Textile Museum of Canada

The Textile Museum of Canada was founded in Toronto in 1975 by collectors Max Allen and Simone Brunel, built around the idea that handwoven, hand-dyed and hand-embroidered textiles deserved the same serious curatorial treatment as painting or sculpture, at a time when textile traditions were often dismissed as craft rather than fine art. The founding collection drew on rugs, garments and fabric pieces gathered from cultures across the world, treating the museum's scope as genuinely global rather than narrowly Canadian.

A quietly significant collection

The museum grew its holdings to include thousands of pieces spanning centuries and continents, becoming one of relatively few museums anywhere dedicated specifically to textile art, and one of the largest of its kind in North America. Housed in a modest downtown building rather than a grand purpose-built structure, the Textile Museum of Canada has remained a smaller, specialist institution within Toronto's museum landscape, valued particularly by researchers and practitioners in textile and fibre arts.

Sources

• Textile Museum of Canada — About
• Wikipedia — Textile Museum of Canada

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