The buzz of student voices and views of vibrant, multicultural fabrics filled the halls of the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum on Friday afternoon for a celebration of the museum’s 10 years on campus.

Students and visitors gathered for student dance performances, hands-on craft activities, a clothing swap and tours through the museum’s five exhibits. The celebration marked the tenth anniversary of the museum’s partnership with GW — plus its 100th birthday — in conjunction with a new exhibit at the museum, “A Tale of Two Houses,” which tracks the museum’s centurylong tenure from its original post in Kalorama to its current home at GW.

Kasey Sease, a curator at the museum, said “A Tale of Two Houses” walks visitors through the 100-year history of the textile museum. She said the exhibition is the first she’s curated at GW after joining the museum in 2023, and she dug through historical artifacts, photos and research from past museum documents and staff to find notable pieces for the show.

Sease said she and her fellow curators wanted to capture the District’s history in the exhibit to showcase the museum’s extensive collection of D.C. artifacts.

“Our museum’s story is rooted in D.C. history. To understand why we do what we do, it’s necessary to reflect on the places where our work started right here in the nation’s capital.” Sease said in an email.

Sease said “A Tale of Two Houses” spans across three galleries, bringing visitors through the museum’s centurylong legacy. She said the first walks visitors through the textile museum’s original Kalorama home, which museum founder George Hewitt Myers’ resided in starting in 1913. She said the exhibit features artifacts from the museum’s original home, from a house guest book signed by old visitors to a 16th-century Mamluk carpet from the house’s foyer.

She said the exhibit next teleports visitors across town with a look at the Woodhull House, where the museum currently resides on 21st Street. Sease said the mansion was built before the Civil War but became a part of GW when an early trustee donated it to the University in 1921. She said the room is full of artifacts from GW’s past, including old yearbooks and campus maps. The final gallery of the exhibit shows the intersection of the museum’s two lives by showing off the 2015 museum opening at GW.

“The exhibition’s final gallery explains how these two stories came together when the museum at GW opened in 2015,” Sease said. “A large photo mural celebrates the many communities our museum has connected with since, from GW students and faculty to local residents and international scholars and artists.” 

At the celebration Friday, K-Pop, Irish and Folklórico student dance crews took center stage at the museum, while visitors busied themselves staring at textiles and engaging in fabric scrap scavenger hunts.

Lee Talbot, a museum curator, said 2025 marks a double anniversary for the museum, and staff wanted to show off the best from its 100-year history, like Mamluk carpets and dragon carpets from the Caucasus in two anniversary exhibits, “Intrinsic Beauty: Celebrating the Art of Textiles” and “Enduring Traditions: Celebrating the World of Textiles.”

“This is our museum’s 100th anniversary, and so we really wanted to celebrate that by showing just some of the greatest textiles in our collection,” Talbot said.

Talbot said Friday’s event was also meant to further the museum’s efforts to use textiles as a way to explore cultures across the world, like one exhibit which features pieces from Indigenous Ecuadorians. He said to accomplish that, the museum brought in three student dance organizations — District K, GW Irish Dance Club and GW Folklórico — to perform at the event.

“One thing we like to do with our exhibits is to use textiles as just a window of learning about different cultures,” he said. “So dance performances, for instance, are an important part of that. And you can see from the dancers’ costumes and such, the textiles were a big part of it.”

Grace Lemoine, a senior studying international affairs and geography and a student museum assistant, said that Friday’s event had been her “pet project” all year. She said it was her job to figure out how the museum would celebrate their anniversary, embracing the relationships the museum has forged during its time on campus.

“We were like, ‘Oh, well, it’s a celebration event of our partnership with GW,’” she said. “Let’s celebrate the partnerships that we’ve made with different organizations and different departments.”

She said those partnerships included the dance organizations who performed Friday. She said she also organized a clothing swap at the event alongside Sustainable GW to promote the museum’s focus on sustainability.

“I really wanted to first and foremost celebrate the cultural aspects of our museum and the sustainability aspects of our museum because those are two really big initiatives that we try to pride ourselves on, not only as partners with GW but just individually, as an institution,” she said.

Maeva Rulis, a first-year history major, said she was looking to pursue museum education professionally and was curious to see how the textile museum presented its collection. She said she is interested in understanding how objects are interpreted and framed for public understanding. 

She said one piece that caught her attention in the gallery was the Buddhist Priest’s Mantle, a rich, royal blue 18th-century ceremonial garment from China displayed on the museum’s second level. 

“If you look around, you don’t see very much royal blue,” she noted. “I haven’t looked at the signage yet, but I assume that it was decently expensive to obtain that. I just like the shaping of it. I’m not really sure what kind of garment it is, but it seems different.”

Scarlett Bromage, a first-year majoring in history, said she came to the museum Friday to see the anniversary exhibits in the lower level.

“They have a really cool project, but we wanted to come and celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the GW Museum,” Bromage said.

She said she was especially interested in textiles because of the complex stories of where clothes come from or how they’re made, which she said people rarely consider when they get dressed.

“What always astounds me here is just how they actually mount the pieces and the colors,” she said. “I mean these things are so old. Textiles are so old. I don’t know how they keep their pigment so well.”