From Cereal to Silk: Marjorie Merriweather Post at Hillwood's Interwoven
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens has opened Interwoven: A Tradition of Textiles this summer, running through January 3, 2027. Rather than presenting cloth as static artefact, the exhibition traces how textile work moved through the hands of one family across generations, and how that inheritance still shapes the way we think about craft today.
Portrait of Marjorie Merriweather Post, Frank O. Salisbury, England, 1942 -46. Oil on canvas. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, acc. no. 51.142
The woman behind the collection led an unusually layered life. Marjorie Merriweather Post inherited the Postum Cereal Company at just 27, following her father's death in 1914, and went on to build it into General Foods Corporation, becoming one of America's first major female business leaders. She used that fortune to fund the arts on a considerable scale, supporting the National Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center among other institutions.
Afternoon Dress, Purchased in New York City, 1905. Cotton lawn, embroidery, cotton -crocheted lace, cording. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, acc. no. 48.18. Photographed by Renee Comet.
That same attentiveness to material culture runs through everything she kept. She preserved antique lace, girlhood garments, and pieces stitched by the women who came before her: her mother Ella, her aunt Mollie, her grandmother Caroline. Post treated textiles the way she treated every object she collected, with an eye for skill and detail, but her holdings reveal something closer to lived affection than acquisition.
Evening Purse, Cartier, New York City, about 1930. Gold, enamel, jade, onyx, wool needlework. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, acc. no. 49.13. Photographed by Bruce White.
That warmth surfaces most clearly in the section titled "A Stitched Family Tree," which gathers embroidered placemats, a handmade lace doily, and sewn baby garments passed down through the Post women. It's a rare chance to see textile skill presented as domestic inheritance rather than museum specimen, evidence of how needlework moved from grandmother to mother to daughter as both practical knowledge and emotional record. Visitors familiar with their own family's stitched heirlooms, a christening gown, a monogrammed handkerchief, will likely find the section resonates in ways that go beyond the objects on display.
Exhibition View: Interwoven: A Tradition of Textiles. Courtesy Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, photographed by Mark Finkenstaedt.
Elsewhere, the exhibition opens with "Centuries of Textiles," surveying the breadth of Hillwood's holdings from paintings and vestments to everyday accessories, and closes with "Commemorative Textiles: Relics of the Past," which considers cloth made to mark specific moments and people. The central section, "Form and Function," gives space to lace, embroidery and needlepoint, Kashmiri shawls, and quilting, including a chair Post had reupholstered in a 19th-to-20th-century quilt, an act of repurposing that feels remarkably current given today's renewed interest in mending and reuse.
Etuis and fittings. England, 1770s. Enamel on copper, gilt copper, metal, ivory. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, acc. no. 15.183. Photographed by Brian Searby.
Contemporary makers appear throughout, with a suspended egg by Manca Ahlin positioned above the lace displays and embroidered work by Sophia Narrett offering a direct line between historical technique and present-day practice.
Women ’s Evening Shoes. Joseph Box, Ltd. London, 1900s. Silk brocade, leather, rhinestones. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, acc. no. 49.89.1 -2.
Curator Megan Martinelli, whose background spans The Met's Costume Institute and previous Hillwood exhibitions on Post's fashion life, has organised the show to honour skilled hands that history rarely names, particularly women whose work went undocumented. Interwoven offers this: a reminder that textile knowledge has always travelled through relationships as much as through technique.
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Further Information:
Interwoven: A Tradition of Textiles this summer is on show now at the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, Washington, D.C.
Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens
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Image Credits:
Lead: Wall Hanging (detail). Probably France, late 1 600s -1700s with late 1800s - early 1900s. Additions and modifications. Silk satin, silk embroidery, linen plain weave, gold metallic -wrapped cord and twill, wool twill, silk damask. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, acc. no. 43.21
All further images as credited in captions.