ABSTRACT
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF) has long displayed historic garments and textiles, both as furnishing for historic interiors and later as historic and artistic works in The Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. These display practices have resulted in visible changes in the textiles collected early in the Foundation’s history. More recent exhibition practices have considered the inherent light sensitivity of textiles and attempted to balance long-term preservation efforts with the labour-intensive demands of short exhibition durations or frequent rotations. In addition to limiting light exposure with defined lighting parameters and limited exhibition durations, CWF has begun incorporating spectrophotometry measurements into textile exhibition workflows to document colour changes resulting from light exposure during exhibition. Instrumental limitations have presented challenges in gathering accurate data, but in general the information has allowed for a better understanding of the consequences of current display practices. Most textiles, when deinstalled after 12–18 months of display, appear visually unchanged but have measurable colour shifts, and textiles in pristine condition display larger changes. These results are described in institutional context, and future plans are outlined.
