Black and white photo of Armenian needlelace garment and person's hands

Elise Youssoufian inspecting a needlelace garment in the collection of the Ararat-Eskijian Museum, Mission Hills, California, 2023. Photo credit: © Deborah Valoma 2023.

public collections

introduction

Noted below are a number of institutions around the world that maintain Armenian needlework in their permanent collections, which often include heirloom Armenian needlelace. A testament to Armenian women’s creativity and persistence, these precious collections are frequently acquired through donations from families who saved their foremothers’ creations. In most cases, such works were either made in native lands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or were created in diaspora once their makers found refuge post genocide.

It is worth noting that an online survey of Armenian needlelace collections at world-class institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the Boston Museum of Fine Art (Boston) reveal limited or no examples of the genre. Additionally, as noted on our Exhibitions page:

We find that most institutions that have significant permanent collections of Armenian needlelace display a portion publicly, while others, usually those with smaller collections, do not. In either case, as can often happen with art practices dismissively categorized as “women’s work” or “ethnic/folk art” worldwide, there is typically little to no information about individual makers retained and presented on exhibition labels.

Exceptions to this trend in the United States are the collections at the Fowler Museum (Los Angeles), the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (Washington, DC), and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University (Cambridge). The Fowler holds a series of needlelace pieces made by Marie Pilibossian, a genocide survivor and social worker who donated her threadwork to the museum in 1980. The Smithsonian and the Peabody feature a number of pieces donated by the estate of Alice Odian Kasparian, author of Armenian Needlelace and Embroidery: A Preservation of Some of History’s Oldest and Finest Needlework.

For information on family collections, see our Private Collections page.

If you represent an institution that holds a collection of Armenian needlelace and would like to be included on the list below, please email us.