Katie Sabo in her Lambertville studio.
Textile Conservator Katie Sabo Stitches Lost Stories Back Together
By Ilene Dube | photos by Andrew Wilkinson
Edgar Degas’ sculpture of a young ballerina in a tutu, holding the fourth position, is oohed and aahed by visitors around the world, from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and Tate, London.
Degas created the original dancer in wax, with human hair, a ribbon, a cotton bodice, and linen slippers. In fact, when it was first exhibited in 1881, it was reviled by critics and the public. They didn’t like how realistic it was, they didn’t like the subject’s attitude, and they didn’t like that it was wax. Degas, known for his paintings, had never publicly exhibited a sculpture before, and he never would again in his lifetime.
The original wax Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer is housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Following the artist’s death in 1917, Degas’ heirs had nearly 30 bronze casts produced, to be distributed among museums and collections worldwide.
Part of the work’s beguile is that, though bronze, the dancer’s tutu is cloth. The chance to restore one of those tutus would become a favorite project for Princeton-based textile conservator Katie Sabo.
Wearing a warm sweater on a cold February day in her Lambertville studio, Sabo was surrounded by bins of fabric, spools of thread, adhesives, and other tools of the trade. A color chart and a drawing of a Robert Rauschenberg piece she worked on are pinned to the wall. The building, an historic textile warehouse with high ceilings, harkens back to the time when lace was manufactured alongside the canal.
“I love being here because of Lambertville’s textile history, as well as its history of being an artist colony,” says Sabo. “A lot of ready-to-wear designers had homes near here in the mid 20th century. Louise Dahl-Wolfe (a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar who was part of the creative team of fashion editor Diana Vreeland) took photos along the canal. And ready-to-wear designer Claire McCardell lived in nearby Kingwood.”
Sabo examining dyed samples for the hair ribbon for the Degas sculpture.
To reconstruct Degas’ dancer’s tutu, made of cotton muslin with a crenellated edge, Sabo began by conducting research on 19th century tutus. She then removed the original, from which she created a detailed scale drawing depicting each stitch to use as template.
Many of her projects sound equally exciting. Take, for example, the 1967 Marc Chagall stage curtain, designed for the finale of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, for the Metropolitan Opera. The sheer size of the curtain — 44×66 feet — required an enormous space to work on it. In addition to her 500-square-foot Lambertville studio, Sabo has a facility in New York for clients who prefer to have work done there, but for this curtain she needed at least 5,000 square feet. Mana Contemporary in Jersey City fulfilled that need.
Upon uncrating, Sabo observed that the curtain, like a mural on linen, was laden with dust, flaking paint, and had many slits and tears. While she usually works alone, the Chagall project required hiring a team of assistants, some of whom Sabo had trained as former students at the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.) in New York.
While the actual conservation took three months, the entire project — with site visits, finding archival images, building a structure with moving panels upon which it could be sewn, testing and developing adhesives and pigments — took over a year. She discovered that large parts of the curtain image, due to peeling paint, were gone. “Perhaps the most important image I used in my treatment decisions was Chagall’s original gouache,” Sabo says in a video documenting the project.
A book of dye sample projects.
“Where does conservation end and restoration start?” she asks. There is a fine line. “What we want to do is conserve what remains and not add anything that wasn’t originally there. The goal is not to make the piece look new…. Working as a conservator, you know that someone else will work on the piece in the future and they may have better materials than you. Your treatment should always be reversible.”
Sabo has worked on projects for the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the New York Historical Society, and the Metropolitan Opera, among others. Artists whose work she has conserved include Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ruth Asawa, Anni Albers, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Sheila Hicks, Joan Miro, Meret Oppenheim, and Faith Ringgold.
And she’s only been in business for 10 years!
Born in Canada and growing up in Long Beach, Calif.; Chicago, Ill.; and Pittsburgh, Pa. Sabo says she was always interested in the history of fashion and “obsessed with historic costume design.” In the late ’90s — “the early days of the internet” — she fell down the rabbit hole of making historic dress as accurately as possible. “I felt I had a knack.”
Watching her mother, a teacher, sew Halloween costumes, upholstery, and some of the family’s clothing on an old Singer, Sabo taught herself to sew.
Kashmiri tapestry-woven shawl fragment from the 17th or early 18th century made of pashmina (goat hair).
She studied history (“another one of my obsessions”) at Reed College in Portland, Ore. “I didn’t study art history because what’s interesting to me is studying the human component, the materiality of each object,” she says.
After attending a lecture on Candace Wheeler, who changed the course of textile and interior design in the 19th century and founded the Society of Decorative Art in New York, Sabo had an epiphany: that textile conservation was a field, and one in which she could combine her interests in history and textiles. She took a few years to travel and work, then applied to the master’s program in textile conservation at F.I.T.
“Sewing is a compulsion,” says Sabo. “I am an addict for sewing; I have to sew.”
Pattern pieces and toile from American sportswear designer Bonnie Cashin’s archive. Formerly in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, Sabo purchased them at auction in 2011.
Unlike some chefs who, for example, prefer to get pizza when off duty, Sabo, when not sewing professionally, still sews as often as she can. She makes pillows and upholstery for her home as well as her own clothes. But, of course, these are not just any clothes. She creates historic reproductions of clothing based on patterns or research she’s conducted. These are clothes she wears at home, not in public.
She uses books by Jenny Tiramani, a British costume historian, for reference.
Gathered trim from a reproduction 18th century bodice Sabo made. The fabric is reproduction 18th century chintz from the Netherlands.
“Everything I make is handmade, I don’t use a sewing machine,” she says. “It’s a personal practice for me. Sewing by machine will not have the quality as when done by hand. I can tell the difference when wearing something. Sometimes if I were to make a historic garment with a machine it feels like the tension is off. When sewn by hand, there’s a movement in the way the seams behave. And a lot of things are just easier to sew that way.”
Before the mid 19th-century, all garments were sewn by hand. In 1851, Isaac Singer, improving on earlier iterations, developed the first modern day sewing machine with a foot pedal and up-and-down needle.
Sabo examines a pre-Columbian textile fragment.
Sabo owns three sewing machines — a vintage Juki, a Japanese Singer from the 1950s, and a Pfaff from the 1980s — that she uses for sewing protective covers and backings. “The machines travel with me” from studio to studio.
“I don’t call myself an artist, but what I do is artisanal and for personal research,” she says of her practice of making her own historic garments. “It gives you a sense of how the garment works, and I can carry it over into my teaching.”
She moved to Princeton 10 years ago with her partner, who is on the faculty at Princeton University. Sabo says she built up her business by word of mouth, over time. “I tell students I took every job; I never said no. I had to do other things to make ends meet.”
What she likes about living in Princeton is “it is green and has easy access to the city. I like the people, and I like the Princeton Public Library.”
Sabo has been on the F.I.T. faculty since 2019. “It’s great to have contact with young people, and I enjoy mentoring the next generation,” she says. Her students have gone on to become conservators, collection managers, curators, and archivists.
Braided custom dyed hair silk filament. Hair silk filament is commonly used in textile conservation.
What is the most important thing she can impart to students, the most important skill in becoming a textile conservator? “Sewing. You should love to sew and be very good at it. Research and chemistry you can learn quickly but sewing is a practice, to have control of a needle is an embodied knowledge.”
Does she ever have “conversations” with the deceased artists whose work she takes apart, analyzes, and rebuilds?
“I was hoping you’d ask that question!” She laughs, yet sidestepping the query, talking instead about one of her favorite books, A Month in the County by J.L. Carr. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the 1980s novella is about a World War I veteran, recovering from trauma, who spends a summer in a Yorkshire village restoring a medieval church mural. According to The New York Review of Books: “Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter’s depiction of the apocalypse, (the veteran) finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life.”
