We are an organizational steward to advance underrepresented textile artists, promote learning, engage social questions, preserve heritage, and encourage joy. We strive to celebrate, amplify and preserve textile culture in the US and around the globe, resulting in a diverse and inclusive community of participants who learn from one another through their shared love of cloth.
• The TATTER Textile Library, home to more than 6,000 books, journals, and exhibition catalogs, serves as an ongoing art installation as well as an academic research space. Different from traditional libraries, the intense presence of color evokes the complex relationship between humans and cloth. The library also weaves the personal collections of seven different women.
• We host 85+ classes per year, engaging a global community of students in an effort to share and preserve hand skills in the areas of sewing, quilting and embroidery. Working with makers, historians, and anthropologists, our classes explore layers of history, inherited craft tradition, technical innovation, and the skills required to manipulate and elaborate cloth.
• The TATTER journal is our voice in contemporary textile art making. It endeavors to help us understand ourselves through a theme and its relationship to cloth. We have published three issues celebrating textiles through the work and words of more than 65 individual artists, activists, scientists, and scholars from five continents.
• We are the keepers of hundreds of thousands of objects that examine and celebrate the global history, traditions, makers, craft, and beauty of textiles.
• The majority of TATTER’s retail offerings are an extension of our programs and classes. The curation and development of intentional materials grounds the programming in our tactile world and offers a vision of the future where we can operate as better informed consumers.
