Susie Brandt Installation A Dialogue With Historic Textile Collection

The Design Center at Philadelphia University presents Rummage, an installation by textile artist Susie Brandt. The exhibition will run from January 24 – April 9, 2008 in The Design Center’s 1950s California-style ranch house in East Falls, Philadelphia.

Brandt, given free range to pick and choose from The Design Center’s historic textile collection of over 200,000 artifacts, plays with relationships conceived between the old and the contemporary. Rummage is, at once, a conversation among Brandt’s contemporary work and the collection pieces; a retrospective of her work of the past 20-plus years; and an archeological dig that tracks Brandt’s pieces back to their textile roots. “There’s a vitality found in the historic textiles that I aim to connect to my own work,” Brandt says. “The old pieces serve as a muse, rekindling the dialogue between my work and the past.”

In one conversation, for instance, Brandt compares “Dainty” – a bedcovering comprised of a huge variety of laces fused into a single complex field of texture - with a 1960s couture ensemble fabricated from a looped and hand-stitched lace-like braid.

Throughout the collection are piles of swatches that were used in the design, production and distribution of Philadelphia’s textile industry. Now housed in drawers and on shelves throughout the house, the sedimentation of these piles will be seized and reinterpreted as an installation in the ranch house’s pantry. 

The detritus of middle American textile culture ¬–rickrack, cast-offs and Barbie doll clothes – all figure in to Brandt’s work. She recasts the original material to create unlikely juxtapositions that alter our expectations and perceptions for works of textile.

For the past 20 years, Baltimore-based Brandt has gathered and refashioned outmoded textile matter into contemporary fabrics that address the vital materiality of textile process and production. In the early 1980s, while studying in the Fiber Department at Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts), Brandt was introduced to The Design Center’s textile collection at what was then called Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (now Philadelphia University). The Design Center’s textile collection houses garments, accessories, swatches and flat textiles that reflect a broad spectrum of techniques, designs, cultures and historic periods. It also documents the American textile industry and, in particular, it chronicles the history of the textile industry of Philadelphia, one of the most diverse of its kind in the nation.