My favorite place to read or write: Vestoj. Read this longform article Amber and I co-wrote here.
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Coming Spring 2021…..
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In September 2019 we—my partner in crime Amber Winick (design historian) and the Maternity Care Coalition (a groundbreaking maternal health care provider)—were awarded a $250,000 Pew Grant. The project will examine how bodies influence design—from fashion fixations to pain relief—and how design influences bodies. The work will explore historical and contemporary conversations around reproduction, maternity,…
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We started a newsletter at Art + Museum Transparency. Find out more here, and sign up!
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The Walker Art Center asked Art + Museum Transparency to sum up 2019. Read it here.
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Today the Rainbow Flag is a familiar sight, at the Pride Parade and around the world. But it is not only a universal symbol; it is also a brilliant object of design that is part of the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, in New York.This story, based on true events, follows the birth…
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I was interviewed by a super smart early-career art historian, Rachel Kubrick, about internships in our field. Read it here.
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I have co-organized this exhibition (and accompanying book and public programs) with a really large team of wonderful people across every single department of the museum, opening Oct 22, 2019 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Designs for Different Futures October 22, 2019–March 8, 2020 Whether it’s apocalyptic, utopian, or still up for grabs, the…
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I spoke to the Design Museum in London about the Lia Pregnancy Kit, which I nominated in this year’s Beazley Designs of the Year exhibition. Read the interview here. Here’s one of the highlights:
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In May 2019, I co-founded the Art + Museum Transparency collective with a group of colleagues and we called for salary transparency and more equitable working conditions in our field. This is ongoing, live work. We released two crowdsourced docs for arts and museum workers: Salary Spreadsheet http://rebrand.ly/salaryspreadsheet and the Internship Spreadsheet http://rebrand.ly/internshipspreadsheet You can submit…
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My brilliant co-conspirator, Amber Winick, and I spoke about our project. “Designing Motherhood: A Century of Making (and Unmaking) Babies,” at Sotheby’s on Mother’s Day. One of our sheroes, Meg Crane, who designed the first at-home pregnancy test, came to the talk and made our day. Thanks to Charlotte Burns for having us.
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I wrote about parenting, labor, and the art world for Hyperallergic (article here). I don’t think anything I’ve ever written has prompted so many responses as this article, and I’m working with colleagues on ways to corral this shared energy into new mechanisms for change. Be in touch if you want to join.
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Sincere thanks to the brilliant Point Line Projects and Ilana Curtis for this thoughtful interview.
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I moderated a panel at the United Nations as part of Céline Semaan’s excellent and thoughtful summit on sustainability and the fashion industry (synopsis here).
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Right now, I’m super excited to be collaborating with brilliant design thinker Amber Winick on a book and exhibition, Designing Motherhood: A Century of Making (and Unmaking) Babies. Find it on Instagram at @designingmotherhood
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Recent piece for Hyperallergic, “African-American Designers Hidden in Plain Sight.” We see objects like the View-Master and New Breed dashiki, both by Black designers, often in our daily lives and yet find them almost nowhere in the places where we preserve and examine our culture. Read more here.
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I was on a panel at TEFAF Spring 2018 titled “RESTRAINING/ADVANCING WOMEN IN POSTWAR AMERICA – IN ART, FASHION, AND MEDIA, 1947-1970” / Restraining and advancing was the critical tension in the depictions of women in art, media, and fashion throughout the 20th century. Perhaps no other period saw such polarized representations as the post-World…
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In September 2018, I moderated a conference on Sustainable Fashion at the French Embassy in New York, featuring from left to right Anne Fontaine, Hervé Ferrage (Deputy Cultural Counselor), Dorothée Charles (Anne Fontaine Foundation) (and me), Marie-Laurence de Chaunac (President of IFM Alumni USA), Laurent Claquin (Head of Kering Americas), Nicole Rycroft (Founder of Canopy),…
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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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I took part in the innovative and wide ranging arts festival held in Inverness, Scotland, each summer, XpoNorth, taking about how museums can fulfill their missions to connect to broad, diverse, and expanding audiences.
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I was really proud to invite the Philadelphia Voices of Pride, members of the Gilbert Baker Foundation, Cake Life bake shop, and Amber Hikes of the Mayor’s Office for LGBTQ+ Affairs to the PMA to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Rainbow Flag, in collaboration with colleagues across the museum who all came together to…
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Speaking on maternity fashion over the last 100 years as part of the free online Coursera course on fashion and design that I co-realized and co-taught.
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I wrote a review of By the People: Designing a Better America for the Journal of Design History, Volume 31, Issue 2, 25 May 2018, Pages 213–216 https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epy019
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I wrote a review of the seminal digital art history resource, SmartHistory, for caa.reviews.
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I will be delivering a masterclass at the Royal College of Art in London at a one-week summer school that provides an immersive introduction to curatorial and critical perspectives that intersect with a wide range of art and design practice.
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In conjunction with Items: Is Fashion Modern? and the related free online course Fashion as Design, for which I was an instructor (mo.ma/fashionasdesign) I spoke with designer Howard Davis about the New Breed, the Afrocentric boutique he cofounded that operated in the 1960s.
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I was part of a visual commission instigated by Creative New York and shot by legendary photographer Brigitte Lacombe showcasing the face of MoMA’s future: young curators and fellows representing each of the Museum’s curatorial departments and MoMA PS1, pictured alongside some of the most exciting New York–based artists.
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From humble origins as an undergarment, to mass-produced fast-fashion staple, to highly collectible (and highly priced) commodity, the white T-shirt is a quintessential product of twentieth-century modernity and the ultimate sartorial and psychological blank canvas. Read my essay for Google Arts and Culture.
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I wrote an essay on authenticity and fashion for the journal Vestoj.
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Items made the NYT end of year best book list for its catalogue and for the exhibition itself!
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The catalogue to accompany the exhibition I co-organized with Jimena Acosta, I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment, released May 2018.
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The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is currently collaborating with MoMA on an exhibition of the latter’s most beloved collection items; I contributed a few short essays to the catalogue–on the Rainbow Flag, the Self-Aligning Ball Bearing, and the Google Maps Pin.
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I have a peer-reviewed chapter on Bauhaus toy design in Megan Brandow-Faller’s edited volume on the material culture of childhood from Bloomsbury Academic Press, released May 2018.
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MoMA/Thames & Hudson. Peer-reviewed. Edited by Paola Antonelli and Michelle Millar Fisher. Texts by Paola Antonelli, Michelle Millar Fisher, and Stephanie Kramer with Luke Baker, Anna Burckhardt, Mei Mei Rado, Jennifer Tobias.
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“Profuse” is a useful word with which to approach this ambitious, high-concept effort. Organized by Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the Modern’s architecture and design department, and Michelle Millar Fisher, a curatorial assistant, it has involved years of research and travel and is as anthropological as it is aesthetic. Full NYT review here.
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I spoke to RTE Irish Radio about my love for the Aran Jumper in conjunction with our exhibition at MoMA, Items: Is Fashion Modern?
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Courtauld Books Online. Peer-reviewed. Edited by Meredith A. Brown and Michelle Millar Fisher, with contributions by Claire Bishop, Andrianna Campbell, David Kennedy Cutler, Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Liz Magic Laser, Richard Meyer, Alexander Nemerov, Ileana L. Selejan, and others. Collaboration has been a component of art making for centuries—from ancient Greek potters and painters to nineteenth-century photographers Hill and Adamson to the contemporary Raqs…
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I was part of the broadcast as Gilbert Baker was remembered for his powerful design of the Rainbow Flag
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I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment April 8-23, 2017 at The Sheila Johnson Design Galleries at Parsons The New School for Design, and January 19-May 22, 2018, at muca-Roma, Mexico City as part of the city’s Year of Design // Co-organized with Jimena Acosta I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment explores…
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March 2017, Brooklyn Rail: “Fashion is absolutely embedded in this conversation, and in multiple ways—as a marker of time and memory, a maker of status, or vehicle for fantastical escapism, certainly, it helps us mediate, describe, and explain modern life. We think of the decrepit clothes of the stonebreakers painted by Gustave Courbet that—ripped, patched,…
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Our discussion ranged from the historical (we’d never heard of early-20th-century “stoutwear” before Lauren schooled us) to the political (what does it mean to call out a certain fashion conversation as “plus size” in a country where the majority of women’s bodies might be described in this way?). We also learned that the concept of plus…
Read MoreP.E.O. Scholar for 2017-18. I am very honored to be a P.E.O. Scholar for the 2017-18 academic year, supported by an amazing chapter and sisterhood of women helping other women with education. During the award period I will complete my doctoral dissertation. The P.E.O. Scholar Awards (PSA) were established in 1991 to provide substantial merit-based…
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I recently spent four intense days in Lagos, Nigeria, researching for MoMA’s upcoming exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern? and I’m certain that this dynamic city is one of fashion’s most exciting crucibles. And, through individuals and collectives focused on design, it may also be at the forefront of a self-organized revolt against and reorganization of…
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