Bard Graduate Center Gallery

A lecture by Emma Cormack (BGC) Depictions of department store shopgirls were common in early twentieth-century silent films in the United States. Socially and professionally, shopgirls occupied a precarious position in the world of commerce, and anxieties about these working girls played out in the era’s silent cinema. The integral role that fashion plays in films such as _Shoes_ (1916) and _Manhandled_ (1924) makes clear that what shopgirls wore—on screen and in real life—was a matrix onto which contemporary ideas about class, respectability, gender, commerce, and consumption were often overlaid. In this lecture (based on her chapter in _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film,_ a forthcoming BGC exhibition catalogue), Cormack will screen selections from the silent period to analyze the figure of the shopgirl, whose shifting identity as worker and consumer is constructed through fashion. Emma Cormack is associate curator for exhibitions and Study Collection curator at Bard Graduate Center. With a background in decorative arts, design history, and material culture, her research specialties include the history of fashion and textiles with a special interest in department stores, consumer culture, and print advertising in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France and the United States. At BGC, she was the cocurator of _Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen_ (2022) and coeditor of the accompanying publication; assistant curator of _French Fashion, Women, and the First World War_ (2019); and curatorial and editorial assistant for _Eileen Gray_ (2020). With Michelle Finamore, she is coeditor of BGC’s forthcoming _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film_ (2026).

A lecture duet by Caroline Dakers (University of the Arts London) and Neil Burton (Architectural History Practice) In this lecture duet, partners in life and in research Caroline Dakers and Neil Burton explore another partnership—between architect, decorator, and color theorist Owen Jones and the wealthy Victorian collector Alfred Morrison. Alfred Morrison (1821–1897) was one of the most important yet least-known Victorian collectors. He filled his houses at Fonthill in Wiltshire and Carlton House Terrace in London with Chinese Imperial porcelain, Old Masters and modern paintings, engraved portraits of famous men and women, coins and medals, autograph manuscripts and objets d’art by Europe’s leading enamelists and metalworkers. From the early 1860s he was the most significant private patron of the architect, designer, and color theorist Owen Jones and employed him to decorate the interior of his London and country houses. Owen Jones (1809–1874) is now known only as the author of the _Grammar of Ornament,_ published in 1856, but in his lifetime he was known as “Alhambra Jones” for his detailed and highly colored studies of the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Spain, published in the 1840s, and as the man responsible for the painted decoration of the 1851 Great Exhibition building. He trained as an architect and embraced the modern technology of the mid-nineteenth century in his use of iron, glass, and fibrous plaster, but his real skill was as an interior designer, and he produced several spectacular interiors, now all lost apart from the London mansion of Alfred Morrison in Carlton House Terrace. While working for Morrison at Fonthill, Jones was able to study the fabulous collection of Chinese porcelain and his study bore fruit in _Examples of Chinese Ornament,_ which he published in 1867. After this pair of talks, Dakers and Burton will discuss what happened to the reputations of Morrison and Jones after their deaths. Dr. Caroline Dakers is professor emerita in cultural history at the University of the Arts London. She is currently working on _British Artists: The Popular View 1850–1950_ for Princeton University Press and is a contributor to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue on Philip Webb (Bard Graduate Center). She edited and contributed to _Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History_ (UCLPress, 2018) and contributed to a conference on Owen Jones in Oxford (October 2024). She has written three books for Yale University Press— _Clouds: The Biography of a Country House_ (1993); _The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society_ (1999); and _A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons_ (2011). She is a fellow of the Society for Antiquaries and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Neil Burton is currently a director of the Architectural History Practice. He was previously a historian with the Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division, an inspector of Historic Buildings with English Heritage, and the secretary of the Georgian Group. His books include _Life in the Georgian City_ (with Dan Cruikshank, published by Viking) and _Behind the Façade: The London Town House Plan, 1660–1840_ (with Peter Guillery, published by Spire Books). He contributed a chapter on Alfred Morrison’s architectural works in _Fonthill Recovered_ (UCL Press, 2018) and contributed to a conference on Owen Jones in Oxford (October 2024). He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

A lecture by Esclarmonde Monteil (Ministère de la Culture) For over three centuries, the textile industry held immense economic and social importance in France. Before its collapse in the late twentieth century, governments endeavored to control, understand, and encourage the production of French textiles. Based on the exhibition _Made in France_ and the rich collection of samples preserved at the National Archives, this lecture will explore the great diversity of a now-vanished production, from the most popular to the most luxurious fabrics. They represent an indispensable source for understanding the history of France, from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day, and the lives of those who contributed to this industry—from the production of raw materials to final consumption. A Dress and Textile History lecture. Esclarmonde Monteil is a French curator, specializing in textile and fashion history. She has directed the Toile de Jouy Museum and the Musée des Tissus in Lyon. She has curated many textile and fashion exhibitions, the latest being _Made in France, une histoire du textile_ at the National Archives last year. An alumna from the École du Louvre and the University of Saint Andrews, she is a knight in the Ordre des arts et lettres.

An Artist’s Residency at Sèvres: A presentation by Kristin McKirdy Celebrated ceramic artist Kristin McKirdy will tell the story of her four-year artist residency at the Manufacture national de Sèvres. She will share the various stages of her experience from preliminary research through the development and execution of several porcelain projects made in collaboration with the institution’s master craftsmen. McKirdy will introduce the various facets of this historical institution—where perfect ceramic pieces are made in a timeless setting, using traditional techniques unchanged since the eighteenth century. Kristin McKirdy is a French-based American ceramic artist known for her organic sculptural forms characterized by purity of design and abstract vision. She holds a master’s degree in art history and archaeology from the Sorbonne specializing in ceramic history and an MFA from UCLA. A four-year artist residency at the Manufacture national de Sèvres culminated in a retrospective exhibition at the Musée de Sèvres in 2012. McKirdy exhibits internationally and has been awarded the prestigious Bettencourt Prize for Exceptional Talent and been named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture.

A Paul and Irene Hollister Lecture by Sheila Barron Smithie (Fellow of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain) and Beth Carver Wees (Metropolitan Museum of Art). The New York firm Marcus & Co. (1892–1942) created exceptional jewelry for an art-loving, wealthy elite. Travels throughout India in 1895 inspired their first distinctive body of design, featuring elaborate gold and colored stone jewels. In the following years, annual visits to the Paris Salons and encounters with the work of Lalique, Colonna, and Vever resulted in an original response to the Art Nouveau style. In this talk, Sheila Barron Smithie and Beth Carver Wees—coauthors of the new book _Marcus & Co.: Three Generations of New York Jewelers_ —will focus on their turn-of-the-century work, produced under the leadership of the family’s second generation, highlighting the firm’s body of extraordinary plique-à-jour enamel jewelry. Surviving objects and archival drawings from two sources reveal new aspects of the firm’s history. _Paul Hollister (1918–2004) was a pioneering critic of contemporary studio glass and a glass historian. Irene Hollister (1920–2016) was a philanthropist, advocate for glass scholarship, and founding administrator of the Association for Computing Machinery. The Paul and Irene Hollister Lectures on Glass were established at Bard Graduate Center in 2007._ Sheila Barron Smithie, FGA, has been a jewelry specialist, researcher, and appraiser at auction houses and galleries. She is a Fellow of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain (FGA) and the recipient of its 2005 Christie’s Prize. As an adjunct faculty member at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, she designed and taught the course Gems and Jewelry: History and Markets for master’s degree students. From 2013, she consulted on jewelry for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helping to research the institution-wide collection for the 2018 exhibition _Jewelry: The Body Transformed._ Beginning her early career as a financial analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co., she worked in investment banking, commodities, and equity research sales and trading in New York, Mexico City, and London. She is a graduate of Harvard University. Beth Carves Wees is curator emerita, the American Wing, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where for twenty years she oversaw the collections of American silver, jewelry, and other metalwork. Prior to joining the Met’s staff in 2000, she was curator of decorative arts at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She lectures internationally and is the author of numerous articles and books, including _English, Irish & Scottish Silver at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute_ (1997) and _Early American Silver in The Metropolitan Museum of Art_ (2013). Beth holds degrees in art history from Smith College and from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. An alumna of the Attingham Summer School and Royal Collection Studies, she currently serves as President of the Board of the American Friends of Attingham. She also sits on the advisory boards of the Association for the Study of Jewelry and Related Arts and of the Silver Society in England. Beth was one of six organizing curators for the Met’s 2018–19 exhibition _Jewelry: The Body Transformed_ as well as a contributor to its catalogue. Her exhibition _Jewelry for America_ was on view at the Met from June 2019 to May 2021.

Join us as we celebrate _(Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness,_ an ongoing, object-based research project that presents a new framework for understanding fashion in America. This evening of dynamic conversations will feature many of the contributors to this exciting multimedia project—which includes a new publication, an online platform, and student-produced digital media (all published by Bard Graduate Center). Co-organizers Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters will share the scope and goals for their project, which seeks to expand the canon of American fashion by centering worn, imperfect, and ordinary clothes—garments that carry material traces of everyday wearers’ bodies, such as stains, rips, tears, mending, and signs of handcraftsmanship. _(Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness_ thus models a new approach to fashion history focused on wear and the wearer in order to illuminate absences and omissions in the dominant narratives of American fashion. *Emma McClendon* is assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University and PhD candidate at Bard Graduate Center. While associate curator at the Museum at FIT from 2011–20, she curated numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions including Yves Saint Laurent + Halston: Fashioning the 70s (2015), Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (2016), and The Body: Fashion and Physique (2019). Recent publications include Power Mode: The Force of Fashion (Skira, 2019), and (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness (BGC, 2025). *Lauren Downing Peters,* PhD, is associate professor of fashion studies and director of the Fashion Study Collection at Columbia College Chicago. Her interdisciplinary research explores the entanglements of dress, the body, and identity, with a particular emphasis on plus-size fashion and standardized sizing; twentieth-century American fashion; and fashion sustainability. Her publications include Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry (Bloomsbury, 2023), Fashion in American Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), and (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness (BGC, 2025). *Jonathan Michael Square* is assistant professor in Black visual culture at Parsons School of Design, the New School, New York. He has a PhD in history from New York University, an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Previously, he taught in the committee on degrees in history and literature at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a fellow at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He curated the exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery (2022–23) at the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis, and is currently organizing Almost Unknown: The Afric-American Picture Gallery (2025–26) at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, Delaware. A proponent of the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom. *José Blanco F.* is associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. He is coauthor with Raúl J. Vázquez-López of the recently published Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico and the soon to be published Global Perspectives in Fashion and Dress. He is the editor of the fifth edition of The Meanings of Dress (2024). He has contributed chapters to several books and published in journals including Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion; Fashion Theory; Dress; and Fashion, Style & Popular Culture. *Dean Hashimoto* is a collector of vintage blue jeans and is interested in how they may contribute to our understanding about the historical development of denim clothing. Dean is a physician and a lawyer. He is a medical director in workplace health at the Mass General Brigham as well as a visiting professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a professor of law at Boston Law School. *Michelle McVicker* is associate collections specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Study and Storage Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She previously worked at El Museo del Barrio, the Museum at FIT, and the Costume Institute. Her research interests include how material culture, specifically clothing, embodies Latinx representation within the US.