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Cathryn Cootner’s passion for textile art began in March of 1966, when she started collecting oriental rugs. By the time she was appointed Associate Curator-in-Charge of The H. McCoy Jones Collection of Tribal Rugs at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in March of 1982, she had expanded her collection with a significant group of Japanese and Bolivian textiles, some Peruvian examples, and a recently acquired African loom. In 1986 when she became Curator of the Textiles Department her collection had grown to include Kuba textiles, headdresses, baskets and other ethnographic objects from Africa, the Philippines, and Indonesia. In June of 1995, Cathryn took early retirement. “Cootner was instrumental in transforming the M.H. de Young Museum of the FAMSF from a little known institution in the oriental rug and textile field to one of its most active and respected. This achievement was accomplished by a level of dedication, determination, vision and energy seldom encountered in the museum world….[and] many of us who have been her friends and her associates over the years know of her global perspective on fiber and other ethnographic art forms. Her voracious personal collecting of a wide variety of material from the Americas, Africa, the Far East and Oceania has resulted in a large private holding of considerable importance.” (Hali, July 2006, Issue 87, John Wertime, pgs. 75, 77) After retiring, Cathryn began leading tours for Caskey-Lees Tribal Art Show in San Francisco. After ten years of tours and forty years of collecting, she retired from both. In 2006, she had a booth at the SF Tribal Art and Textiles Show. Hali’s review (Issue 145, March-April 2006, pg 112) reads, “….the Tribal Show also marked the ‘coming-out’ of the museum’s former textile curator Cathryn Cootner as a very serious occasional ‘dealer’, selling superb items from her extensive private collection. Her tsutsugaki resist-dyed yogi (kimono-shaped bedding) was said by those who know to be the best of the highly visible Japanese folk textiles in the show (1), and her array of Mbuti bark-cloths from the Congo were as good as any I have ever seen.” Appearing in the 2007 fall issue of Hali Magazine, Cathryn Cootner’s article on Mbuti Pygmy bark cloths will appear on this website a few months later. Also on this website she will be offering for sale a different array of textiles and objects from her renowned collection. |
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