Uncommon Threads: Wabanaki Textiles, Clothing, and Costume

The museum's groundbreaking exhibition, Uncommon Threads: Wabanaki Textiles, Clothing, and Costume, has closed.

Uncommon Threads was the museum's most ambitious exhibition of artifacts borrowed from other institutions. In handling loans from museums in the United States, Canada, and Australia, museum staff and consulting conservators were especially attentive to documenting the conditions of the exhibit's fragile textile objects. In the photo here, objects conservator Teresa Myers, of Teresa Myers Conservation Services, examines a birchbark container as she documents its condition during travel preparations.

A Special Uncommon Threads Exhibit Project Brings Wabanaki Women Together to Re-create a Maliseet Chief's Outfit from the late 1700s

See how modern day Wabanaki textile artisans Frances Frey (Passamaquoddy), Jennifer Neptune (Penobscot), and Rose Tomah (Maliseet) used historical techniques and materials to meticulously re-create an outfit from the late 1700s that would have been worn by a Maliseet chief. The reproduction, based on a fragile original from the late 1700s in the collection of the New Brunswick Museum, includes a cap, mantle (or matchcoat), sashes, breechcloth, and leggings and was displayed in the Uncommon Threads exhibit. It is now available for loan to other museums or cultural centers. The Coby Foundation Ltd. and the Davis Family Foundation provided special funding to re-create the chief's outfit