Photographer and Artist Charles Sheeler’s Rarely Seen Textiles on View at James A. Michener Art Museum

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW: Recognized as he was as a fashion photographer and artist, Charles Sheeler also dabbled in textile design and now those seldom-seen items are being shown at the James A. Michener Art Museum. Chief curator Kirsten Jensen said, “There was this brief period in the Thirties when a number of modern artists — Stuart Davis, Edward Steichen — were designing textiles and this was not unique to America. A number of European ones were, too. There was a real interest in applying modernism to textile design. In 1933, Sheeler delved into textiles after he had ended his five-year run shooting for Condé Nast in 1931. Around that time, he wrote to his patron Louise Arensberg that he was designing fabrics for women’s sportswear, Jensen said. The Doylestown, Pa., exhibition features some of his knit fabrics as well as his woven cotton and linen samples. The textiles have not been exhibited since 1939 when Sheeler had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (for which his friend William Carlos Williams wrote the catalogue). During a visit in Connecticut, Sheeler showed them to another pal Marcel Duchamp who “really loved them,” Jensen said. “It’s significant that the Museum of Modern Art included

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