One woman's influential contribution to modernism, achieved through a fascinating revival of tapestry Marie Cuttoli (1879-1973) lived in Algeria and Paris in the 1920s and collected the work of avant-garde artists such as Georges Braque, Joan Miro, and Pablo Picasso. In the ensuing decades, she went on to revive the French tapestry tradition and to popularize it as a modernist medium. This catalogue traces Cuttoli's career, beginning with her work in fashion and interiors under her label Myrbor. She subsequently commissioned artists including Braque, Le Corbusier, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Miro, and Picasso to design cartoons to be woven at Aubusson, a center of tapestry production since the 17th century. Today these cartoons-paintings and collages by canonical artists-are often understood as autonomous works of art, but this catalogue uncovers their original purpose as textile designs. Beautifully illustrated with rarely exhibited works by giants of European modernism, Marie Cuttoli reveals the significant contributions of a shrewd and visionary woman as well as the role of the decorative arts in the development of the movement. Distributed for the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Schedule: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (February 23-August 23, 2020)

Here is a story of a young girl of nine years old, who has so many trials and tribulations. Thrown into womanhood at an early age, she finds happiness and love in her teens. She becomes strong through it all and ends up wanting nothing but to leave her home in Mississippi. The south where there is nothing, but cotton fields and white landowners. She was seeing people leaving one by one, for points west, east and north. She wished to leave also for a better chance at life for her and her family.

Mary Crovatt Hambidge (1885-1973) was an aspiring actress and a professional whistler on Broadway when she met Canadian-born Jay Hambidge (1867-1924), an artist, illustrator, and scholar. Their relationship would prove to be both a romantic and an artistic partnership. Jay Hambidge formulated his own artistic concept, known as Dynamic Symmetry, which stipulated that the compositional rules found in nature's symmetry should be applied to the creation of art. Mary Hambidge pioneered new techniques of weaving and dyeing fabric that merged Greek methods with Appalachian weaving and spinning traditions. The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, formed during the mid-1930s, provides an artists' community situated on six hundred rural acres in the north Georgia mountains where hundreds of visual artists, writers, potters, composers, dancers, and other artists have pursued their crafts. Dynamic Design details Jay Hambidge and Mary Crovatt Hambidge's cross-cultural and cross-historical explorations and examines their lasting contributions to twentieth-century art and cultural history. Virginia Gardner Troy illustrates how Jay and Mary were important independently and collectively, providing a wider understanding of their lives within the larger context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and design. They were from two different worlds, nearly a generation apart in age, and only together for ten years, but their lives intertwined at a pivotal moment in their development. They shared parallel goals to establish a place where they could integrate the arts and crafts around the principles of Dynamic Symmetry. Troy explores how this dynamic duo's ideas and artistic expressions have resonated with admirers throughout the decades and reflect the trends and complexities of American culture through various waves of cosmopolitanism, utopianism, nationalism, and isolationism. The Hambidges' prolific partnership and forward-thinking vision continue to aid and inspire generations of aspiring artists and artisans.