THE CATHRYN COOTNER COLLECTION
Important Single Owner Sale of Ethnographic, Tribal & Textile Arts

Live Auction Day 1: Sunday, November 14, 2021, 10am
Live Auction Day 2: Monday, November 15, 10am

Also accepting phone and absentee bids.

Exhibition: Saturday, November 6 – Saturday, November 13, 11am – 4pm
Join Us! Reception & Auction Highlights Gallery Talk by Tribal Arts Specialist, Bruce Frank, Saturday, November 13, 1pm – 4pm

Browse the Auction Catalog and Bid Live on these Portals:

Day 1: Ethnographic and Tribal Art

 

 

Day 2: Textiles | Weaving Arts | Fine and Folk Art | Furnishings | Jewelry

 

Absentee Bid Form | Telephone Bid Form | Terms and Conditions (PDF)

Cathryn M. Cootner was a fixture in the world of ethnographic art and textiles. Her remarkable passion for tribal arts of all kinds was known from New York’s Hajji Baba Club to San Francisco’s annual Tribal Arts Show. An eternal student, she collected and studied, taught and exhibited diverse tribal arts for more than 40 years.

Cootner gave her first university lecture on textiles in 1968. By 1981, she was guest curator at the Textiles Museum in Washington, D.C. and the next year she was appointed by San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Memorial Museum to be their first Associate Curator in Charge of the Rug Collection. Later becoming Curator of Tribal Rugs, and Curator-In-Charge of the Textiles Department, Cootner’s robust acquisition and exhibition program is credited with transforming the Museum into the well-respected repository for high quality textiles and oriental rugs that it is today. Chief among her accomplishments was a watershed exhibition of Caroline and H. McCoy-Jones’s unsurpassed collection of Anatolian kilims in 1991.

Also an appraiser and author of two books, Cootner’s interests and passion for tribal arts were as much a part of her personal life as her professional. Outside the museum walls, she was a consummate collector, amassing a houseful of ethnographic textiles and objects from around the globe, each one with a story she loved to share.

Material Culture is privileged to offer The Cathryn Cootner Collection, an Important Single Owner Sale of Ethnographic, Tribal & Textile Arts.