One of the first gifts to the Cleveland Museum of Art was an important collection of laces donated by founder Jeptha H. Wade II in 1914. This donation formed the nucleus of the textile collection. Miss Gertrude Underhill, who joined the museum in 1916 to catalog the library's collection of photographs, was given the task of also cataloging the lace collection. Miss Underhill remained at CMA, becoming assistant in charge of textiles in the Decorative Arts Department in 1924 and Curator of Textiles when it became a separate curatorial department in 1944. Miss Underhill founded the Textile Arts Club, now the Textile Art Alliance, in 1934. The purpose of the club was to "encourage and maintain interest in the textiles arts, to enlarge the collection of textiles of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and to further educational courses, lectures, workshops, and exhibitions" ( The Cleveland Museum of Art Archives, Vertical File - Textiles, Revised by-laws of the Textile Arts Club, adopted 26 March 1969. Miss Underhill retired from the museum in 1947.

Upon Miss Underhill's retirement, Director William Milliken hired Dorothy G. Shepherd as Associate Curator of Textiles. Miss Shepherd, born in Welland, Ontario, Canada, received her BA (1939) and MA (1940) from the University of Michigan in Oriental civilizations, specializing in Islamic art. Her Ph.D. studies at New York University focused on Hispano-Islamic textiles. In 1942 Miss Shepherd was appointed Assistant to the Curator of Decorative Arts at the Cooper Union Museum, in which capacity she was in charge of the textile collection. During World War II she served in the Office of War Information in London and Luxembourg and also with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Division of the United States Military Government in Frankfort and Berlin where she assisted in the recovery of works of art hidden by the Germans.

In 1952 Miss Shepherd was appointed Curator of Textiles and in 1955 she was also appointed Curator of Near Eastern Art and Adjunct Professor of Near Eastern Art at Case Western Reserve University. During her tenure as Curator, she developed the museum's textile collections to include the most complete collection of medieval Persian textiles in the world and also important Egyptian textiles. A primary focus of Miss Shepherd's research was a group of Persian textiles known as the Buyid silks, reportedly first discovered in 1925 in the vicinity of Raiy. Textile authorities believed the silks to have been created during the Buyid rule of Iraq and Persia, ca. 945-1060 AD. However, their authenticity was questioned as early as 1947. Miss Shepherd concluded after extensive research that this group of textiles was authentic. She presented a number of papers and published articles detailing her research and findings. At the time of her retirement from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1981, Miss Shepherd was an internationally recognized authority on ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art and medieval textiles.

Ann English Wardwell joined the staff of the department of textiles as Assistant Curator in 1967. Her BA in Art History from Sweet Briar College in Virginia and MA from New York University focused on medieval European art, particularly decorative arts. She received her education in textile arts under the tutelage of Dorothy Shepherd. One of the first projects assigned to her at CMA was to research fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italian Gothic silks. This ground breaking six-year project culminated in a major research paper describing the influence of Islamic and Oriental design on European silks which was published in Islamic Art in 1989. Ms. Wardwell was also interested in the authenticity of the Buyid silks and conducted additional analyses, including carbon 14 dating, translations from the Arabic into English, and epigraphical studies. In cooperation with Harold Glidden, Norman Indictor, and Sheila Blair, she published a number of articles about these analyses and their conclusions.

In her thirty years with the museum Ms. Wardwell curated nearly twenty major exhibitions of historical textiles and the biannual "Focus: Fiber" exhibition sponsored by the Textile Art Alliance. She was also a prolific writer. Her research took her to all corners of the globe to systematically study and purchase Central Asian and Chinese textiles. The culmination of her research on silk was the exhibition "When Silk Was Gold" cosponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition focused on not only the silk trade, but also the origins of design and weaving techniques. Her most notable discovery included in the exhibition was the "Winged Lion" silk, which she identified as having been woven by a displaced Persian artisan in China. Ms. Wardwell retired from CMA after opening "When Silk Was Gold" in 1997.