Curatorial Scholarship

An image of the Home Textiles and Commodity Bags case.

A detail image from the Commodity Bags case featuring a tote from ANYBAG and two handbags from riv.et.ing.

Material Resistance: Social Justice and Empowerment Narratives Told Through Cloth
Jill Stuart Gallery, Cornell University
Curators: Dyese Mathews, Kat Roberts, Jenine Hillaire, and Ami Tamakloe

Material Resistance: Social Justice and Empowerment Narratives Told Through Cloth, a fashion and textile art exhibition, invited visitors to explore cultures, cloth, making, designing, artistry, and life through a critical lens that challenges the current injustices that have a stronghold on our society.

The five artists and three community-focused organizations featured within this textile art and fashion exhibition illustrate how cloth can be a medium for expression, resistance, and empowerment. The diversity of artists, organizations, and works involved in this show were selected to highlight multiple identities, regions, and social justice issues. Among the topics explored in these works were police violence, reproductive rights, violence against members if the LGBTQIA+ community, and missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirited people.

As part of this work, community members were also invited to create their own social justice quilt square during a workshop led by Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA) founder Sara Trail. These squares are currently being assembled into a quilt by SJSA volunteers and will later be displayed at Cornell University.

Past and Present Lives of Upcycled Fashion
May-September, 2023
College of Human Ecology, Cornell University

Past and Present Lives of Upcycled Fashion explored contemporary commercial fashion upcycling. Though upcycling has long been an individualized domestic practice, it has recently evolved into a critical method of sustainable, circular production in the commercial sphere. In an ironic shift from past engagement, which was often spurred by material or financial scarcity, today’s surge in upcycling is a response to the staggering quantities of pre- and post-consumer materials resulting from unsustainable rates of production and consumption. The work of fashion upcyclers keeps these valuable materials out of landfills while challenging contemporary definitions of waste.

The exhibit was organized thematically by materials used in upcycling and the processes by which they are transformed. These thematic sections include Commodity Bags, Home Textiles, Deadstock, and Waste as material sources for inspiration and the techniques of Surface Design, Assemblage, and Fine Arts. Each section celebrated the makers, materials, creativity, and highly individualized practices of contemporary upcycled brands.

Funded by the Charlotte Jirousek Fellowship from the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, this show was initially mounted as a physical exhibit at Cornell University in the spring of 2023 and has since been made available to wider audiences through a dedicated website.

You can explore the digital exhibit here.

Detail image of the “Still Here” garment by indigenous designer Agnes Yellow Bear.

Material Resistance: Social Justice and Empowerment Narratives Told Through Cloth was funded in part by the Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities Public Curatorial Expression Fellows program, the Mellon Program in Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, the Cornell Council for the Arts and its Cornell Biennial, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection.

This exhibit was awarded the 2023 Marilyn DeLong Curatorial Exhibition Scholarship University Excellence Award by the International Textile and Apparel Association.

Explore the digital exhibit here.

A screen in the gallery playing Ghanian trans multidisciplinary artivist Va-Bene Fiatsi’s short film Ritual of Becoming. In the foreground is Dr. Tameka Ellington’s dress
“Sis Alligator Meets Trouble”.

Fashion in Transit
College of Human Ecology and Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
Curators: Kat Roberts, Christine MacDonald, Mona Maher, and Joshua Johnson

Fashion In Transit explored the aesthetics of clothing and accessories worn by bodies in motion and how fashion affects and is affected by the transit swarm. At a fundamental level, clothing functions as a form of transportation: shoes for walking, wingsuits for flying, skis for sliding, and soft robotic exoskeletons that facilitate arm and hand movements. Modes of transportation have also impacted dress and brought about new fashions, like dusters for early car travel, aviator jackets and sunglasses, uniforms for transit workers, and activewear for running, snowboarding, swimming, hiking, among other activities. The manufacture of clothing, shoes, and accessories also relies upon transportation infrastructure, which shapes distribution networks and transnational material flows within complex global apparel supply chains.

This work was a collaboration between the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy, the Kheel Center for Labor-Management and Documentation Archives, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. The exhibition began in digital form as a final project for the fall 2020 class, Curating Fashion Exhibitions, which was part of the “Fabrication” focal theme for the Society for the Humanities.

Explore the digital exhibit here.

This image from the Walking case shows a contemporary outdoor ensemble paired with a soft robotics mechanotherapy leg wrap, cane, and a walking dress and boots from 1874.