Stitching the Exhibition Together: The Spatial Life of Textiles in the Ukrainian Museum’s A Living Canvas

In the exhibition A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum at 50, two woven skirts—plakhty in Ukrainian—sit in the middle of a dark green gallery devoted to “Geometry and Figuration.” One rises horizontally on a narrow wooden frame. The other opens across a lower support, its checked surface folding outward and downward into space. Neither has been arranged to reconstruct the silhouette of a woman wearing it. The textiles bend, project, sag and turn. Their supports remain visible, as do the paintings behind them. Depending on where one stands, the skirts can read as clothing, sculpture, patterned planes or pieces of temporary architecture.

That instability is useful to us, particularly if one comes to historic clothing as a primary source rather than primarily as an illustration of “traditional dress.” As an archivist who works with fashion, textiles and costume, I am interested in garments as documents: things constructed, handled, worn, repaired, folded, stored, inherited and eventually accessioned into collections. Deep reading happens at the level of the object. A seam tells us how something was put together. Abrasion records repeated contact. A repair marks an intervention in the life of the garment. The back can provide information that the finished social image presented by the front obscures. What caught my attention was not the prominence given to textiles, but what exhibition designer Sofia Fani Gutman had made available for our looking.

A Living Canvas establishes the conditions for this, placing folk and fine art into a common formal field. Geometry, texture, materiality, line and color bring embroidered cloth, costume and woven textiles into visual conversation with painting and sculpture. Its introductory text describes the boundary between the village workshop and the artist’s studio as historically fluid, drawing attention to visual languages shared by the woven kilim, painted canvas, embroidered rushnyk and modernist composition. The title is particularly apt. Canvas is textile before it becomes the support most closely associated with painting, and A Living Canvas repeatedly unsettles the distinction between a woven surface and a painted one. Gutman pushes that proposition off the wall and into the room.

The installation also grows out of a developing relationship between the Ukrainian Museum and Cooper Union, two East Village institutions. Their collaboration brings students, faculty and staff into exhibition design and community-centered curatorial work. Gutman trained in architecture at Cooper Union, and the exhibition’s wooden display structures were fabricated collaboratively by a team of Cooper Union students, including first-generation Ukrainian American sculptor Michel Darling. The Museum–Cooper Union partnership thus becomes materially visible in the gallery: these supports are not neutral exhibition furniture, but structures that determine how the cloth falls, which surfaces become visible, and how visitors move around the objects.

Gutman told me that textiles were the first objects that drew her into the exhibition. “Before anything else, I was the most drawn to the textiles,” she said, “and the most drawn to the question of how can we reimagine the space around them?” That question produced some productive friction with a curatorial team carrying decades of knowledge about Ukrainian art, museum display and textile conservation.

In one discussion, Gutman recalled, a proposed display configuration had begun to trouble the expected identity of the object. “They’re no longer tapestries,” a curator told her. “They become sculptures at some point.”

For Gutman, the objection named precisely what excited her. “The moment she said, ‘Oh, they become sculptures,’ my heart opened up,” she told me. “That’s exactly that. It’s about seeing them not only as this work of labor, of this work of female labor, but of this art that deserves to be displayed, that deserves to be showcased … as a form that can take up space.”

Walking through the galleries with her later, that fairly abstract proposition became much more specific.

The two Poltava-region plakhty, both dating from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, are woven wrap-around skirts. Their geometry makes them particularly apt for this room: the exhibition text itself links the structural logic of the checkered plakhta to strong horizontal and vertical lines in modern painting. Gutman’s installation does not leave the interpretive connection solely to the wall text. The skirts project into the room before a wall of paintings. Their checked surfaces answer the geometries behind them, while the fabricated wooden structures add another set of verticals, horizontals and right angles. The mounts remain conspicuous enough that textile, support, painting and architecture are read together.

One plakhta is held higher, stretching horizontally before falling at its edges. The second sits lower and opens across its support. Enough of the wrapped form remains for the object to register as clothing, but the fabric is also divided into planes: front, fold, opening, underside, and edge.

“We know it’s a skirt,” Gutman said when I asked why she had resisted presenting it conventionally. That recognition did not need to exhaust the object. “There’s something about taking it out of the context of a skirt and of an item of clothing and seeing it as a sculptural piece,” she explained, “to imagine it taking a different form than a skirt, and to be able to look at it not only as something that you wear, but as a piece of art.”

For me, the pleasure of the installation lies partly in the reverse of that transformation. The plakhty become more sculptural, but they also become more insistently textile. On a conventionally dressed mannequin, the finished silhouette tends to become the dominant source of information: this is what the clothing looked like when assembled on a body. Here there is no single privileged view. Moving around the skirts reveals seams, reverses, joins, folds, changes in density and evidence of wear.

As we circled one of them, Gutman drew my attention to what she called its “underbelly.” “I wanted to show the underbelly, to show the making of it,” she said.

I was looking at something slightly different: the garment’s wear. That difference became part of our conversation.

Textiles accumulated for a bride’s posah, or trousseau, were not necessarily ceremonial objects destined to remain untouched inside a skrynia. Many passed into the material routines of married and household life. Once a garment survives into a collection, the material traces produced by that life become part of its documentary record: friction, fading, stretched areas, damage, mending, and reinforcement. We have to be careful not to turn every stain or repair into a story for which there is no evidence, but neither should we treat such traces as noise around an otherwise pristine object. Wear tells us that something happened there.

Gutman looked again. “This was something that was worn,” she said. “This was a piece that was used and loved.”

That exchange gets close to what I value about seeing costume installed this way. Gutman was interested in making and construction; I was looking for evidence of use. The same opening of the garment made both readings possible. Calling the plakhta sculpture is therefore useful only up to a point. Its new spatial autonomy does not erase function or somehow rescue the skirt from the category of clothing; it gives us another way to read the garment precisely as clothing.

A gallery away, two Hutsul lizhnyky develop the problem differently. The heavy wool blankets, made in western Ukraine in the 1930s, are patterned in gray with colored zigzags. The Museum’s “Texture and Materiality” section places them within Carpathian sheep-herding and textile production, moving from the tactual qualities of the woven surface to shearing, cleaning, carding, spinning and weaving. It also explicitly compares their density to the built-up surfaces of modern painting.

Here the angular wooden supports rise and descend before dropping again toward the floor, allowing the blankets to follow them rather than flattening the textile into a rectangular picture. Gutman told me that during prototyping they called these forms the “flying carpets.” The nickname is playful, but the important thing is gravity. Display a lizhnyk flat and its zigzag pattern is immediately legible as a field. Here a line travels over an edge, descends a slope and partially disappears. The design changes with one’s viewing angle. At the ends, the heavy wool falls under its own weight.

You have to move around the object to put it back together visually. That movement also reorganizes the gallery. The lizhnyky sit low within a large room and function almost as islands, dividing space without stanchions or a prescribed route. The visitor decides whether to pass beside them, between them, or around their ends. Gutman described her design process in similarly bodily terms: where will someone stand, what will enter the field of vision from that position, and how might an object redirect movement through a room? Her concern is not one ideal frontal view but what she calls “the user experience of the space.”

Nearby, the Hutsul hunia changes the scale of this encounter. The thick, hairy outer garment hangs without a mannequin, elevated above ordinary shoulder height. Gutman described it to me, wonderfully, as appearing almost like “a kind of godly being floating over you.” From a distance its sleeves and shoulders make its vestimentary identity unmistakable. Up close, silhouette gives way to fiber. Individual strands protrude into the room, and the opening exposes the more compact construction beneath its shaggy exterior. “You get to look at every hair,” she said, “at every stitch. You get to see the inconsistencies in the thread.”

You can also see intervention. Small areas of mending interrupt the surface, and this is where the garment becomes especially valuable as a document. A repair records a decision: at some point the damage mattered enough, or the garment mattered enough, for someone to intervene. Without further evidence we cannot know whether that decision arose from scarcity, economy, attachment, convenience or something else. But the mend remains an event in the object’s history. It tells us that the garment continued after damage.

This is the sort of evidence that deep reading of dress can bring forward. Clothing documents its past not only through regional embroidery customs, fiber identification, cut or ceremonial association. It records repeated contact with the body and the hand. What was reinforced? Where did abrasion happen? How were two pieces joined? Was a tear carefully darned or roughly patched? Did an alteration respect the original construction or cut straight through it? Such questions cannot always be answered in an exhibition, but the installation can either encourage us to ask them or hide much of the evidence from view.

The absence of glass is noted here too. The eye is allowed an unusually tactile encounter with the hunia: protruding fiber, raking light, shadow, inside and outside, original surface and repair. Nor does the coat need a completed museum body beneath it. Shoulders, sleeves, length, weight and opening already imply one. The wearer remains absent without the bodily history of the garment disappearing.

This principle recurs across the textile installations: the objects can be seen in the round. The plakhty can be circled. Visitors move around the lizhnyky. The hunia exposes its opening, sides and reverse. Even the more recognizably dressed historic costume ensembles hang from above rather than sitting against a surface or enclosing mannequins. A 360-degree display changes what counts as the object; the reverse ceases to be backstage.

Museums are generally institutions of fronts: the completed image, the public face, the side conventionally selected for interpretation. Backs contain the evidence that complicates completion—knots, loose threads, seam allowances, repairs, mounts, tension and support. For textiles this has particular consequences. Folk and decorative arts have often been presented through pattern, type, function or national identity, while the material acts that produced and sustained the object remain less available. Showing a reverse cannot recover an anonymous maker or supply a provenance that does not exist, but it can make the evidence of making, handling and intervention much harder to overlook.

Gutman spoke repeatedly about this. “I wanted to show the back of the fabric, for the viewer to be able to look around it and go behind it, to see the labor that was put into it, and to be able to see the process of making.”

Her attraction to that process is not only formal. Gutman described having “a very emotional relationship with textiles” and with displacement and diaspora, speaking of a family lineage across Ukraine, Palestine and Brazil. She also talked about textile practice as something contemporary and communal, something she encounters through people making, stitching and embroidering around her rather than only as a finished object inside a museum.

Jaroslava Lialia Kuchma’s My Father’s Grove takes that interest in reverse, process and movement closest to architecture. The 1997 hand-woven work, made with a cotton warp and wool weft, appears as three tall suspended panels separated by several feet of open space. Gutman first encountered the textile from what would normally be called its wrong side. “The first time I saw this textile, I saw it the other way around, the inside out,” she recalled. “And I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

She knew it as a work shown horizontally, where its landscape qualities were readily legible. The reverse suggested another possibility. “I immediately thought about how sculptural it is,” she said, “and how three-dimensional it is. And it just called me to give it the option to be a three-dimensional form in space.”

The title My Father’s Grove begins to operate differently when the textile is installed this way. A grove consists not only of trees but of the spaces between them. Gutman has given those intervals physical consequence. Seen frontally, the three panels remain a visual ensemble. Step sideways and they narrow sharply; one can almost disappear into a line. A painting behind it suddenly comes into view. The textile can be image, object, screen or partition depending upon where the visitor stands, and one looks through the work as much as at it.

Gutman’s photojournalistic practice was part of her design practice here. She told me that she often thinks about space through a frame: what combination of textile, painting, sculpture and architecture will occupy the eye from a particular position. Stand beside one of Kuchma’s panels and it cuts into the view between paintings. Step back and the three panels reorganize the wall behind them. Turn and one of the Hutsul lizhnyk remains visible through the passage into the adjacent ochre-colored gallery.

The Museum’s headings—“Black and White,” “Geometry and Figuration,” “Tree of Life,” “Iconographic Traditions,” “Texture and Materiality,” “Line and Space,” “A Celebration of Color,” “Storytelling”—give the exhibition an intellectual structure. Gutman’s design keeps those categories from becoming sealed rooms. Kuchma remains in visual contact with a lizhnyk in the next gallery. Other suspended textiles control space, intercept paintings or establish alignments between objects made generations apart. The stitching metaphor becomes fairly literal here: a stitch joins discrete things while leaving a seam.

The traditional costume displays near My Father’s Grove make another version of the same argument. A late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Volyn woman’s ensemble—embroidered shirt, striped woven skirt, bodice and sash—is recognizably a dressed costume. Nearby hangs an early twentieth-century Bukovynian shirt with its woven sash. But again, neither is a mannequin display; both are suspended from the ceiling, held away from the wall and open to inspection from all sides. On a later visit, I noticed the garments moving almost imperceptibly as people passed through the gallery. Their suspension allows a degree of movement that a mannequin or wall mount would suppress. The effect briefly restores something usually lost when costume enters a museum: cloth responding to the movement of the surrounding bodies rather than being fixed into a permanent silhouette.

This is a quieter intervention than the folding plakhty or the architectural treatment of Kuchma, but hardly a conservative one. The Volyn ensemble retains the architecture of a body: the sleeves project outward, the bodice establishes a torso, the skirt gathers at the waist and expands below it. Yet there is no head, no articulated set of arms or legs, no neutral museum person completing the image. The Bukovynian shirt is sparer still. Suspension permits each garment to retain bodily volume while keeping the absent body visibly absent.

Their shadows complicate that absence. Cast onto the wall, the garments produce secondary silhouettes that seem to supply something like a ghost body without ever resolving into one. This matters because a mannequin is never merely practical support. It can help us understand how clothing works on a body, but it can also overdetermine the reading, turning a complicated primary source into an illustration of what a representative Ukrainian woman supposedly looked like. Here the body remains necessary to understanding the garment but is not supplied as a complete answer.

For researchers, the ability to circle these costumes may be even more consequential, as their backs and sides are no longer secondary views. We can follow a seam around a body, compare the treatment of front and reverse, look at where fabric gathers under another piece of clothing, and examine how components of an ensemble actually meet. These mounts approximate one important condition of close object study: the freedom to change position and allow different evidence to come into view.

None of this openness came without constraint of course. Historic textiles are exceptionally vulnerable to light, gravity, handling, vibration, and proximity. Gutman was candid that the design she initially imagined changed through discussion with curators and conservators, whose knowledge she relied upon even when it limited what she wanted to do. Those constraints, she said, forced the design continually to ask why: why this position, this distance, or this mount?

That is a more interesting account of experimental exhibition design than a story in which a young designer arrives to overturn conservative museum practice. The friction is part of the exhibition; it is also part of its scholarship. What we see in A Living Canvas is the result of negotiation among curatorial interpretation, conservation, design and fabrication.

Gutman describes the closeness eventually achieved as a form of trust. These are vulnerable objects, and are culturally precious to the communities from which they came. Yet the exhibition does not build its relationship with the visitor principally through prohibition and distance. Gutman wanted the viewer close enough to notice fiber and irregularity.

Her thinking about that relationship extends beyond this exhibition. She spoke to me about experimental art practices she has encountered in New York and Ukraine, where artists make exhibitions in apartments, offices, basements and buildings never designed to become galleries. What interests her is not informality for its own sake, but the way such spaces destabilize assumptions about where art belongs and how people are permitted to encounter it. Near the end of our conversation she described wanting museums to “give back to the community and open up to the community, as much as receive from it.”

That larger ambition need not carry the entire interpretation of A Living Canvas. It is visible here at a fairly precise scale: in how close a visitor may stand to a coat; in whether the inside of a skirt is treated as meaningful; in whether a blanket becomes an obstacle to be navigated rather than a pattern to be surveyed from the front; in whether a historical costume is permitted to retain bodily shape without manufacturing a body for it.

The exhibition therefore does something more complicated than promoting folk objects into the category of fine art. That would leave the old hierarchy intact while allowing selected textiles to cross its border. Here classification does not dictate display quite so rigidly. The plakhty remain clothing even as they establish geometry in the room; the weight of the lizhnyky forces pattern to negotiate gravity and visitors to negotiate space. The empty hunia retains evidence of wear, mending and a missing body without a mannequin completing it, while Kuchma’s woven landscape becomes something through which other works can be seen. Even the historic costumes remain unmistakably costume while their construction becomes available in the round.

For someone accustomed to treating garments as primary-source documents, this may be the most compelling thing Gutman’s design accomplishes. It does not ask us to stop understanding these textiles through use, region, technique, labor or the bodies that once inhabited them in order to appreciate them aesthetically. It gives those histories more surfaces on which to appear.

The textiles have been given room to do different kinds of work. In A Living Canvas, they also make the space around them.