curator | writer | educator / currently at The Philadelphia Museum of Art + formerly at MoMA, the Met, and the Guggenheim
Peer reviewed article forthcoming fall 2018 in the academic Journal of Visual Culture. Guns are usually designed with great attention to their aesthetic, ergonomic, and functional component parts. Yet, their contemporary manifestations are considered so culturally and symbolically fraught—especially in the United States—that guns produced in the last century have rarely been presented as industrial objects…
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Join me at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on October 10 for Pay What You Wish Wednesday in conjunction with Design Philadelphia for a really special “In the Artist’s Voice: Contemporary Design Conversations” gallery talk session co-sponsored by Ladies, Wine & Design Philly. 6:00–6:30 p.m.: Explore experiments in counter-fashion with the cofounders of the Rational Dress…
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In early November I will give a paper on the work of product and industrial designer Charles Harrison and the fashion designer company New Breed as part of a symposium marking the opening of African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race. This symposium gathers scholars and design practitioners who address all aspects…
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On August 25, 2018, my wonderful co-curator and author on I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment, Jimena Acosta and I launched our book. Look out for the sister event in Philly in the fall at the brilliant Ulises art space in Fishtown.
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I’ll be speaking at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum as part of the annual Design History Studies conference in early September on the kilt and its many manifestations and cultural (dis)locations. “As a textile design and a fashion item, the kilt now stands as a cipher for romanticized Scottish nationalism and rugged masculinity. However, the…
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I wrote this article for Hyperallergic in July 2018 outlining a topic that has been percolating in my mind for some years, namely thoughts on why curatorial effort isn’t always acknowledged by museums and the press.
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I was interviewed (here) by my former colleague, Ariele Dionne-Krosnick, for Crea-co about what it means to be a curator today, the challenges of highlighting diverse work in a field notorious for its lack of diversity, the mentors who have inspired me, and some of the unique design stories I have uncovered along the way.
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