Mae Festa 50 Years of Collecting Textiles - Peter Pap Oriental Rugs

INTRODUCTION
During the period since my retirement
from a lifetime in the professional design
field, I have been assembling this catalog
of my textile collection. In this process,
I found the full satisfaction of realizing the
vitality, diversity, excitement, and depth of
what had been brought together.
I grew up in a Manhattan neighborhood,
close to the riches of the New York world
of art and the museums and galleries where
it was accessible. The opportunity to spend
untold hours wandering the halls of these
great institutions was invaluable in my
early years. It was also very fortunate that
my first serious job was working for a
contemporary design firm in the forefront
of the modern movement. Those were the
days of total immersion in the world of
international modern design, the feeling
that a whole new visual world was in the
making and that nothing else mattered very
much. New architecture, new furniture,
new couture, new cinema, new music, et al.
Following those early years, when my
husband and I were living in Athens, where
he was on assignment, I began to find and
appreciate ethnographic weaving and early
textiles. It was then, in the early 60’s, that
I acquired my first small pieces from
Greece, Asia, and Africa. The very first
pieces were from the Plaka, an ancient
Athenian marketplace, in 1961. There were
two fragments, pieces from traditional
19 th century Attica wedding costumes, one
a sleeve end and the other the border of a
dress. They consisted of very brightly colored
blocks of embroidery which resonated in
my mind with many of the Paul Klee forms
of the 20’s and 30’s. What a revelation.
During the 1970’s I began working
professionally as an interior designer in
an architect’s office. This gave me the rare
opportunity to use textiles as a part of
permanent art collections in many of the
large corporate projects we did. It also gave
me access to some of the world’s very best
sources, opening up the world of textiles
to me.
Not until after my first trip to Turkey in
1979, did I begin to seriously consider
traveling extensively to regions where tribal
and ethnic textiles were still being made and