On September 5, alumni, students, and trustees came to the opening of Pattern and Process, Selections from the Kravet Archive in the NYSID gallery at 70th Street. The exhibit was curated by Darling Green and designed to resemble the Kravet Archives in Bethpage, NY, complete with flat file drawers that hold selections of important textiles, objects, and documents and visitors can pull out to study. Said Darling Green’s Jeremy Johnston, one of the curators of the exhibit, “Working with the Kravet family, we understood that they don’t intend the archive to be a museum, where samples are locked away, never to be touched. This is a living archive, intended to be a tool that designers interact with and take inspiration from.”

Johnston estimates that they pulled a fraction—much less than 1 percent—of the archives for the show, as the Kravet Archive is a vast repository of textile design history. The oldest object in the show was an Egyptian textile fragment from 500 BCE, but the show also included many contemporary textiles, selected because they educate about a design process, motif, or production method. Among the breathtaking pieces in the exhibit were a contemporary “tree of life” block print, made the traditional way in Thailand using 365 blocks for a single repeat, and Japanese katagami stencils (1850-1912) made from thinly pressed mulberry, a glue made of persimmons, and threads of silk or human hair.

“One of our goals with this exhibition was to share our collection with anyone currently studying design or textiles from a historical perspective,” said Ellen Kravet, chairman of the board of the New York School of Interior Design and executive vice president of Kravet Inc. “We hoped to provide perspective on how designs from the past can readily be interpreted and produced for the future of design.”