A Classic Serape with a Red Field, also known as the Kahlenberg Serape, Navajo, circa 1840.
The Kahlenberg Serape measures 71 inches long by 49 inches wide, as woven.
The serape is ex- Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, of Los Angeles and Santa Fe.
During the 1970s, Kahlenberg was Curator of Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In 1972, Kahlenberg and Tony Berlant co-curated The Navajo Blanket, the first major museum exhibition of nineteenth century Navajo blankets.
Berlant and Kahlenberg’s The Navajo Blanket, the exhibition catalog, was published in 1972 by Praeger Publishers and LACMA, Los Angeles. In 1977, Walk In Beauty also by Berlant and Kahlenberg, was published by New York Graphic Society, Boston.
A detail of the center of the Kahlenberg Serape
The Kahlenberg Serape is ex- Jessica Murphy, Seattle. Works of art from Murphy’s collection are now in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum.
In 1996, the serape was sold to Mary Kahlenberg by Murphy’s great grandson. Later in 1996, Kahlenberg sold the serape to Margot and John Ernst of New York. During the 1990s, the Ernst were the co-chairs of the George Heye Foundation, Museum of the American Indian at Bowling Green, New York.
The Kahlenberg Serape is currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by donation from Margot and John Ernst, 2019. [MMA Accession Number: 2019.373.4.]
The red yarns are raveled bayeta dyed in the original European woolen fabric with lac. All of the red yarns were raveled from the same bolt of bayeta woolen fabric. The blue yarns are handspun Churro fleece dyed in the yarns with indigo. The white yarns are un-dyed handspun white Churro fleece.
A letter dated August 22, 2007, from Dr. David Wenger of Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Dr. Wenger’s letter regards the raveled red yarns in the Kahlenberg Serape. Wenger confirms that the serapes raveled red yarns were dyed with “pure lac,” and that there is “no evidence for cochineal or synthetic dyes.”
Mary Kahlenberg died on October 27, 2011. The following biography was excerpted from an obituary by Dennis McClennan that appeared in the November 1, 2011, edition of the Los Angeles Times. The photograph is by Jackie Mathey.
Mary Hunt Kahlenberg dies at 71; museum textile curator.
Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, an authority on antique and ethnographic textiles and a former curator and head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), has died. She was 71. Kahlenberg, the longtime co-owner of Textile Arts Inc., an art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, died of carcinoid cancer Thursday at her home in Santa Fe.
Over the last five decades, Kahlenberg traveled extensively around the world learning about and searching for textiles. Her specialties were Indonesian and Japanese textiles and, closer to home, nineteenth century Navajo blankets. Textiles meant everything to Kahlenberg, her husband, Rob Coffland, said. “Mary loved the encoded history, she loved the textures, the colors, the technique, the feel of the object in the hand, the sense of the maker. I mean it just goes on—and always with the eye of the connoisseur: Does it engage the mind and the heart? Mary wanted to have textiles seen as art.”
As curator and head of the textile and costume department at LACMA from 1968 to 1978, Kahlenberg was the curator of more than twenty-five exhibitions and installations. Exhibitions during the 1970s included The Navajo Blanket, Textile Traditions of Indonesia, and L. A. Flash, an audiovisual presentation exploring how people in various Los Angeles neighborhoods dressed.
“I thought she was a remarkable woman with impeccable taste, who during her tenure curated a wide range of interesting exhibitions, including the first museum exhibition of Indonesia textiles,” said Sharon S. Takeda, senior curator and head of LACMA’s textiles department. “She made very astute selections in building the permanent collection, including a Ballets Russes costume collection, the John Wise collection of pre-Columbian textiles, and the Heeramaneck collection of Islamic textiles.”
After leaving LACMA in 1978, Kahlenberg launched Textile Arts Inc., in Los Angeles, and became the private curator for Lloyd E. Cotsen, then-president of the Neutrogena Corporation. Cotsen amassed an extensive collection of textiles and folk art from around the world. In a statement to the Times on Monday, Cotsen said, “The passing of Mary Hunt Kahlenberg touches many of us, including myself. She opened windows to our lives in terms of textile art. Mary not only was a most knowledgeable person but a really good friend.”
Kahlenberg was involved in numerous books as an author, contributor or editor, including Walk in Beauty: The Navajo and Their Blankets, and The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Textiles and Objects From the Collections of Lloyd Cotsen and the Neutrogena Corp. Her final book, Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles, which Kahlenberg edited with Ruth Barnes, was published in 2010, and won the Wittenborn Memorial Book Award.
Kahlenberg was born in Meriden, Connecticut, on October 19, 1940, and grew up in Wallingford. She later recalled playing in her family’s attic as a young girl and coming across a hatbox filled with old ribbons of various colors and textures. “I became very enamored of those ribbons and all of the old clothes that hung around in the attic,” she said in a 2010 interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican. “I give credit to those materials for my interest in textiles, which started very young, making doll clothes and collecting little scraps of things here and there.”
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in art history from Boston University in 1962, Kahlenberg did graduate study at the Austrian Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, the Master School of Crafts in Berlin, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Before her tenure at LACMA, Kahlenberg was assistant curator at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.
Kahlenberg and Robert Coffland, her second husband, moved to Santa Fe in 1986. Even after she was diagnosed with cancer in 2005, Kahlenberg continued to travel, making her last trip to Indonesia in December, 2010. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her sister, Nancy Barnes.
