New York City – If walls could speak, they would undoubtedly ask to be dressed by the Valentino of wall covering Maya Romanoff. This week the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) acknowledged his artistic impact with a celebration marking the 40th anniversary of this seminal American designer.

On display were examples of the tie dye designs that started it all.

Romanoff literally burst upon the scene in the late 1960s as the artist who brought the ancient art of tie dying into the mainstream of western fashion. As if following a counter cultural atlas, after graduating from Berkley in 1965, he and his first wife took to the road traveling through Europe, India and North Africa, where he first experienced tie dye in a marketplace in Tunisia. It was after their travels and the weekend that was Woodstock that Romanoff and his wife first attempted to turn their passion into a business. Loading 180 tee shirts they had dyed into a VW van they headed to a Rolling Stones concert in Miami. Within the first hour they had sold every shirt and, as they say, the rest is history.

Although he took New York by storm through the support of the Parrish-Hadley design firm and with clients like Roger Daltry, Barbra Streisand, Donald Trump and Cheryl Tiegs, Romanoff settled in Chicago and what had started as tee shirts now included jackets and shirts and robes and, yes, tie dyed wall coverings. Although there is a Romanoff tie dyed opera coat hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, it was this passion for surfacing that would ultimately be his claim to fame and inclusion into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian.

Ahead of the curve when it comes to the concept of a global village, Romanoff has long incorporated exotic barks, crushed stone, tortoise shell, vegetation and now even beads from the four corners of the world into his fantastical wall coverings. Over the years Romanoff has combined both ancient and innovative techniques to create flexible surfacing designs that are as practical as they are breathtaking.

Visionary designer Maya Romanoff at the Museum of Arts and Design celebration honoring his 40th anniversary.

Sadly, Romanoff is in the most advanced stages of Parkinson's disease and is confined to a wheel chair with the just the faintest of abilities to communicate verbally. Yet, he remains the chairman and chief creative officer of his internationally respected company. Always at his side, his present wife Joyce Romanoff, who has been with the company for 22 years and heads up the operational end of things, told me, "He still inspires us and he is the arbiter of all our designs and colorations."

On the sixth floor of the museum were several tables on which Romanoff artisans demonstrated the process of creating the designs and patterns of the highly sought after surfacing material. From the thinnest of veneer panel work that we watched vegetable dyed to a rich mahogany to the strikingly luxurious Mother of Pearl design that was flexible enough to be rolled like a newspaper, Joyce explained the techniques with pride and admiration for her husband's creations.

At the cocktail party on the seventh floor I spoke with Julio Capua, publisher of Architectual Digest, "The Romanoffs have been innovators all along and they continue to do things that set the industry standard of craftsmanship and unique materials. You are really dealing with a true family business, it is in their blood and they are passionate about it. As an artist, I think Maya fused everything through an artist's palette. As a result, you see them do things that really no one else can do."

Designer Amy Lau explained her involvement with the Romanoff company, "I re-imagined their anniversary collection, now in their fourth year. I went through the archives and I looked at Maya's work from the 1960s and 1970s and I thought what was now looking back, looking forward and re-imagined, re-contemporized and brought to it some new brushes. We did an exclusive installation at Bergdorf-Goodman on the seventh floor and I created a limited edition product line."

Joyce Romanoff explaining the Romanoff technique and design process in the creation of their Mother of Pearl surfacing.

Among the many notable attendees was legendary designer Jack Lerner Larson who made a brief earlier appearance to congratulate the artist he had mentored as a young man. Also in attendance was architect David Rockwell, designer of the last two Academy Awards presentations, who during his speech said, "I think of the incredible spirit in your work and I think in fact Maya that you are a kind of dream weaver that weaves together craftsmanship and love and art. I think in an age in which there is such a reliance on technology and virtual connections, what is phenomenal about what Maya does is to return us to the importance of the actual crafted piece."

Words can not express the stunning beauty of the samples that were on display at MAD, nor can they fully do justice to the impact this extraordinary and courageous visionary has had on the world of design. If the walls could speak, they would indeed thank Maya Romanoff as did the hundreds of fans and friends who gathered in celebration of his 40th anniversary.

For more information go to www.mayaromanoff.com.