Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, a leading authority on historic textiles and co-owner with her husband of a Railyard gallery, died Thursday. She was 71.

Kahlenberg, a former curator of textiles and costumes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she built its Indonesian and pre-Columbian collections, was instrumental to bringing the Neutrogena Collection to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe and curated the first exhibition in 1998.

Respected worldwide, Kahlenberg was in the vanguard of the movement to present textiles as an art form, as opposed to artifacts.

According to her husband, Rob Coffland, when Kahlenberg first proposed an exhibition of Navajo blankets for LACMA in the early 1970s, museum colleagues suggested it more properly belonged in a natural history museum. Her reply? Items in the exhibit came from the likes of famous contemporary artists Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, "and they think it's art."

"Mary lived an incredible life," said Coffland, her husband of 30 years.

Kahlenberg was raised in Wallingford, Conn., and did her undergraduate work in art history at Simmons College and Boston University.

In an article for The New Mexican last year in connection with publication of her last book, Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles, she said her interest was sparked by a box of ribbons and the old clothes in the attic of her childhood home.

She pursued graduate work in textiles in Vienna and Berlin, where she lived with her first husband, who worked for the United States Information Service, and at the Art Institute of Chicago. She also studied textile conservation with Karen Finch in London when her husband was transferred there.

In 1967, she became assistant curator in charge of textiles from Morocco to the Philippines at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. After that, she spent 10 years at LACMA, where she curated over 19 exhibitions (including the first exhibition in the U.S. of Indonesian textiles) and contributed to several museum publications.

After leaving LACMA in 1978, she worked with Lloyd Cotsen, CEO of Neutrogena. She was his "muse," according to Coffland, her second husband, whom she married in 1982. Kahlenberg helped build Cotsen's collections of bamboo baskets and sculpture, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, contemporary basketry gifted to the Racine Art Museum and the textiles and folk art in the Neutrogena Wing at the folk art museum in Santa Fe.

Kahlenberg and Coffland moved to Santa Fe in 1986. Their TAI Gallery, founded in 1978, is now in the Railyard. It specializes in antique and ethnographic textiles, Japanese bamboo art and photography.

Her books include: Walk in Beauty: The Navajo and their Blankets; Grass: Its Beauty and Uses; Rites of Passage: Textiles of the Indonesian Archipelago from the collection of Mary Hunt Kahlenberg; The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Textiles and Objects from the Collections of Lloyd Cotsen and the Neutrogena Corporation; Indonesian Textiles with Richard Tuttle; and most recently, Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles with Dr. Ruth Barnes (the book winning the 2011 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award).

Bobbie Sumberg, curator of textiles and costumes at the Museum of International Folk Art, said the acquisition of the Neutrogena Collection "really did improve our existing collection of textiles with some outstanding pieces, some real masterpieces." In addition, she said, "The Neutrogena gift put the museum in both a national and international spotlight."

And in the world of galleries and dealers, she added, Kahlenberg "raised the caliber of what Santa Fe has to offer" by bringing the art form of Japanese basketry to the public.

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.