photography by Sally McCay
Fabric of Life
The blend of optimism and naiveté brought tears to Michele Pagan’s eyes.
She had slowly humidified the fragile white silk flag, and then painstakingly spread it on the huge worktable in the back of her part-time home in Brookfield, Vermont. The piece was tattered and grimy, its creases hardened with age. It was also beautiful, the painted regimental logo uncommonly luminous and fine.
A fabric conservator’s work is precise, not emotional: A second-by-second nimble calculus of smoothing, pressing, reshaping, daubing. But looking at the white silk flag that the first Vermont regiment to fight in the Civil War carried into battle stirred Pagan’s emotions. White silk. What were they thinking?
“That first regiment signed up for three months. They thought they’d be back in three months, and it would be over and done with,” she says. “Maybe that’s why you hand-paint a white, silk flag to go off to war… you were thinking this was some little thing, and you’d be back…"
STAR-SPANGLED BANNER TO PILLBOX HAT
Fabric tells stories. Flags, apparel, bedclothes and rugs—the warp and weft that we cherish and then pass down— are cultural inheritances, history made physical, a direct means of contacting those who came before us. For much of the last three decades, Pagan’s profession and pleasure has been taking care of these fragile inheritances in hopes that their beauty and stories will communicate with future generations.
The idea of making fabric conservation a profession wasn’t much on Pagan’s mind—or anyone’s, really, the field was then in toddlerhood at best—during America’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976. Pagan, who earned her UVM bachelor’s degree in home economics education in 1973, was working as a teacher in Hartford, Connecticut at the time. One day while leading her students in a values-clarification exercise she started pondering the big questions herself. If money were no object, if you never had to worry about earning a living, what would you do with your time?
Pagan realized she wanted to preserve the culture. And, as an expert seamstress who had been making dresses since girlhood, fabric seemed like the right place to start. “I suddenly stopped and said, ‘Those really old fabrics you see on exhibit in museums, they are important. And they are really beautiful, too. I want to help preserve them. I have had it with making bridal dresses,” she says with a sardonic clap of her hands, “and doing alterations. There’s something deeper here about preserving the culture that’s really important.”
She soon traded teaching for graduate school at the University of Connecticut, completing internship projects at Old Sturbridge Village and elsewhere, before being hired as Colonial Williamsburg’s first-ever textile preservationist. Her work at Williamsburg raised her stature in the field, and led to a series of high-profile projects: Years at the Smithsonian Institution with the team restoring the immense (30 feet by 42 feet) original Star-Spangled Banner, a short and emotional turn spent preparing a traveling exhibition of Jackie Kennedy’s clothes to go on display at the Corcoran Gallery, freelance contracts to spend hands-on time with treasures from many places and eras. But the best work, she says, is right now.
“I felt like this must be the peak of my career—and yet, I’ve said that before. But this is,” she says.
Pagan’s two current projects, conserving Vermont’s long-neglected collection of Civil War flags, and participating in a group effort to catalogue, revive, and save the state’s collection of painted theater curtains, are as challenging as anything she’s done before. The theater curtains, in particular, vaulted her into new, highly technical areas of conservation and stimulating collaboration with other experts also new to the unprecedented work being done. Better still, the projects let Pagan spend more time in her beloved home state (she also lives in Washington, D.C.), giving something back to the place where her love of history, architecture, and old fabric first began.
Both efforts are also rich in moments, such as looking at the laboriously unrolled first Civil War flag from Vermont, when the barriers between now and a century ago blur and the past becomes palpable.
ON THE VERMONT STAGE
“It happened once when we just finished a curtain, hung it up on a stage, and rolled it down,” Pagan remembers, describing a luminous moment in Redding, Vermont. The stage was worn, and the sockets for the uplighting still lined the proscenium edge. Pagan found herself imagining the town hall in 1890, electric light washing up and over the bright and fanciful stage, patrons arriving from miles around on foot and in muddy coaches. “It would have been like Broadway,” she continues, “especially if you didn’t have electricity yet... You must have felt chilled seeing this roll up and the play begin.”
The Vermont Painted Theater Curtain Project, which is led by Chris Hadsel of the Vermont Museum and Gallery Alliance, began in 1996 with a survey to find and assess the curtains. The group started with six, but over the ensuing eleven years, they have located 176 curtains, and restored one hundred of them, installing most back in their original homes in town halls, grange halls, community theaters, and opera houses—giving Vermont the largest and best-preserved collection of curtains anywhere.
The curtains are made of fragile canvas muslin and were painted by highly skilled itinerants with water-soluble distemper paint. The scenes are fanciful, detailed and bright; they tend to conjure luminous visions of Britain and France, complete with lush villas, romping stallions and trompe l’oeil. Refined, detailed scenes and fragile raw materials—not to mention, in many cases, a century spent in a guano-encrusted grange hall attic—made conserving the curtains an adaptive, patient, and collaborative process.
Pagan admits to some trepidation when she initially signed on for the painted curtains project, knowing it would be pioneering conservation work. But five years in, the group has refined their techniques, and is sharing them around the country and the world; Pagan presented the project at an international meeting of conservators held at The Hague, Netherlands. She says that distinction may well be the highlight of her career.
But then, she’s said that before.
(for UVM staff)