curator | writer | educator / currently at The Philadelphia Museum of Art + formerly at MoMA, the Met, and the Guggenheim
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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