Venerable textile design firm Schumacher is no stranger to partnering with outside artists and designers. In fact, its first collaboration was with French fashion designer Paul Poiret—in 1930. “Collaborations bring a different point of view,” says the brand’s chief creative officer, Dara Caponigro. “They allow us to explore sensibilities that we might not otherwise on our own.” Two of their recent artist collaborations offer very different looks, but both weave in Schumacher’s distinct DNA. The first, with Colette Cosentino, came about when Caponigro discovered the artist’s painted canvases covering huge swaths of chain-link fence at the under-construction botanical garden Lotusland in Montecito. “My work is not loud; it whispers the imaginary,” Cosentino says. “I get to play like a child—spontaneously painting gardens, rivers, trees and birds.” Those charming scenes of flora and fauna are now represented in a line of ethereal wallcoverings. Upstate New York artist Richard Saja reached out to Schumacher when he was working on a solo show for the Musée de la Toile de Jouy in France to ask for toile he could embroider. Soon, La Liberté Americaine was underway. “Every single inch is embroidered by hand and completely one of a kind,” Saja says of the fabric. “I wanted to capture, in the most color-saturated way possible, the full range of diversity inherent in the American spirit.”
