“Remnants of Our Lives: Maine Women and Traditional Textile Arts” Project & Exhibit

"Remnants of Our Lives: Maine Women and Traditional Textile Arts" was an exhibition, sponsored and curated by the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History in collaboration with the Hudson Museum, the University of Maine's anthropology museum within the Maine Center for the Arts. The exhibition celebrated the skills, talent, and creativity of fifteen Maine women, representing the state's diversity of folklife communities, through a selection of textile objects, narrative texts based on oral history interviews with the artists, photographs, and interpretive panels. The exhibit focused on the theme of rites of passage, a motif which resonates through all of the narratives that were collected during the field research phase of the project; the textiles were presented as aesthetic expressions of life status changes. The project's advisory panel included University of Maine faculty, outside professionals associated with textiles and folk arts, as well as two traditional artists who contributed to the selection process.