The Accidental Curator

Althea McNish was one of the most talented textile designers of the 20th century. She was an incredible artist, technically assured and confident in her use of colour. Her work has been described as being like bathed in sunshine. She came to Britain from Trinidad in the 1950s and was enormously successful, designing scarves for Liberty, fabric for the upmarket furnishing shop, Heals, and textiles for Italian couture houses. The Queen wore her designs, smart cruise liners sailed with her work on their walls, and her weaves were on British Rail's new trains in the 1970s.   Althea McNish's best-known textiles were designs like Golden Harvest which combined an English wheat field with the colours of Trinidad, or Painted Desert, where small cities in black ink shot through with orange floated on a bright pink background. But as time advanced, Althea McNish was unjustly forgotten and at the end of her life, she was almost completely obscure. That is now beginning to be put right with an exhibition about her and her work which was first shown at the William Morris Gallery in London and is now at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester until the end of April 2023. The exhibition has been curated by Rose Sinclair, an academic and independent researcher, who has been doggedly tracking Althea and her work for some years. Here is Rose's story of how the exhibition came about and why it's important.   There are pictures and links to the exhibition on the special dedicated page for this episode on the Friends of Haptic and Hue site at https://hapticandhue.com/friends-haptic-hue/