Engaging Communities, Empowering Students: Fostering Cross-Cultural Connections through Dress, 1936-1958 reassesses the founding of Cornell’s Fashion + Textile Collection through a justice-oriented lens. This exhibit shows how international students helped to foster cross-cultural understandings of dress on Cornell’s campus through their involvement in static and live fashion exhibitions as well as through their own self-fashioning practices on and off campus in the mid-twentieth century.
*Recipient of the 2022 CSA Richard Martin Exhibition Commendation Award
WOMEN EMPOWERED: Fashions from the Frontline chronicles how women have strategically and persistently used fashion to empower and uplift. From activists to politicians, academics to servicewomen, artists to athletes, entertainers and everyday unsung heroes, WOMEN EMPOWERED uses fashion to tell the stories of women on the frontlines. The exhibit is therefore organized according to physical spaces where fashion transforms, at times transgresses, and ultimately empowers.
GREEN ARMOR: Wrap, Protect, Cover, Perform explores and celebrates the power of the color green as a form of armor throughout fashion history. This exhibit was a rapid fashion curation project spearheaded by undergraduate and graduate students in Dr. Denise Green’s “Curating Fashion Exhibitions” course and was curated in response to the COVID-19 campus climate.
In Search of Costumes from Many Lands: The Collecting Practices of Beulah Blackmore and Ruth Sharp critically examines the collecting practices of Professor Beulah Blackmore and Mrs. Ruth Sharp, two women who contributed to the development of ethnological dress collections on Cornell’s campus in the mid- to late-twentieth century.