Ted Hallman has been at the vanguard of modern textile design since the late 1950s, when he began to combine natural fibers with acrylic, a relatively new material at the time that had been developed for military use during World War II. The juxtaposition of natural fibrers with the luminous new synthetic material was wholly original at the time. A nearly identical hanging by Hallman was included in the seminal 1969 exhibition Objects USA, which introduced Americans to variety of new designs of the emerging craft movement and helped to bridge the perceived aesthetic gap between so-called craft and fine arts.