In one conversation, for instance, Brandt compares “Dainty” – a bedcovering comprised of a huge variety of laces fused into a single complex field of texture - with a 1960s couture ensemble fabricated from a looped and hand-stitched lace-like braid.

Throughout the collection are piles of swatches that were used in the design, production and distribution of Philadelphia’s textile industry. Now housed in drawers and on shelves throughout the house, the sedimentation of these piles will be seized and reinterpreted as an installation in the ranch house’s pantry. 

The detritus of middle American textile culture –rickrack, cast-offs and Barbie doll clothes – all figure in to Brandt’s work. She recasts the original material to create unlikely juxtapositions that alter our expectations and perceptions for works of textile.

For the past 20 years, Baltimore-based Brandt has gathered and refashioned outmoded textile matter into contemporary fabrics that address the vital materiality of textile process and production. In the early 1980s, while studying in the Fiber Department at Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts), Brandt was introduced to The Design Center’s textile collection at what was then called Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (now Philadelphia University). Brandt earned a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. Her works have been included in over 100 solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. When she returned to Philadelphia in the 1990s to teach at her alma mater, Brandt introduced her own students to The Design Center’s collection, one of Philadelphia’s hidden treasures. Brandt presently serves on the faculty of the Maryland Institute College of Art.