Stay in touch!

Join Allen Bassing, the Renwick programs coordinator at noon today. Hold in your own hands the materials used in a range of craft objects.

Using the Renwick's "touch pack," Mr. Bassing will discuss texture to give visitors a sense of the surfaces of craft art in the permanent collection Meet in the Lobby of the Renwick Gallery located at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, across from the White House.

"We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental . . . Concrete substances and also color per se, words, tones, volume, space, motion—these constitute raw material; and here we still have to add that to which our sense of touch responds—the surface quality of matter and its consistency and structure."

—Anni Albers, 1965

Source: National Museum of American Art. (Washington, D.C. and Boston, New York, Toronto and London: National Museum of American Art with Bulfinch Press, Little Brown and Company, 1995).

Pictured: Anni Albers (1899 Germany–1991 USA), Ancient Writing,1936, woven fabric, 59 1/4 x 44 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Young.