About

The Lanzetta Collection began in Luxor, Egypt, in 1978, with the purchase of a simple blue and white brocade; a lifelong passion for textiles was launched. For nearly five decades, New York-based artist Margaret Lanzetta has built a collection that has profoundly influenced her creative studio work. Today, the archive has grown to over 120 textiles from 30 countries. The collection reflects a deep engagement with the history, symbolism, and craftsmanship of global textile traditions, serving as an important resource for her studio practice.

The Lanzetta Collection is curated with an artist’s eye, deeply prioritizing visual impact, social relevance and/or cultural significance. Eschewing a hierarchical, exclusionary curatorial approach, the collection celebrates vibrant textiles from all traditions, high and low. Thus, the archive includes rare historic pieces of highly refined artistry and fine natural fibers as well as contemporary, everyday synthetic textiles distinguished by bold patterning and inventive dyeing techniques.

As an artist, Lanzetta collages textiles and handmade papers with painting and silkscreen to investigates cross currents of global decorative traditions in relation to contemporary cultural and political narratives. These color-saturated, tactile works manifest notions of craft, geometric abstraction and hybridity embodied in textiles.

Lanzetta uses culturally resonant patterns and materials to meld geopolitics with centuries-old motifs. www.MargaretLanzetta.com

Acknowledgements:

My initial gratitude for the creation of this archive belongs to my longtime assistant, now dear friend and talented sommelier, Joyce Lin. Over the course of ten years, beginning in 2011, Joyce meticulously measured and labeled much of the collection and organized the data in a precise spreadsheet. This spreadsheet gave us an invaluable running start in 2026, when formal photography, documentation and research resumed.

I am very grateful to College of the Holy Cross intern Lindsay Gill for her indefatigable hard work and meticulous attention to detail in 2026 as she photographed the collection , updated the original archive and helped create this website. Lindsay’s museum-quality registrar skills, fine visual acuity as a budding art historian, and the tenacity of a track-and-field athlete truly brought this project to life.

My deepest gratitude goes to the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program and the National Endowment for the Arts for awarding numerous fellowships to India, Syria, Thailand, Singapore, Morocco and Indonesia. This institutional support fostered an indepth investigation into the confluences of color, pattern, and cultural exchange embodied in global textiles, as well as their relationships to the historical and present-day trade networks of Southeast and Central Asia and the Middle East, from antiquity to contemporary practice.

The Lanzetta Collection has been greatly enriched by generous textile gifts from the following friends: