Can collective healing processes be manifested through creative activities? If so, how might we envision this taking place? The meticulous curation of the Social Threads exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider how communities have organized visual …
Gallery Exhibition
Layers of History Woven into Lace
With their unassuming appearance, these two bobbin lace pieces may at first seem like mere objects of craft, evocative of a time when lace adorned everything from haute couture fashion to the furniture of our …
Weaving Between the Lines: Authenticity, Identity, and Place(s) of Origin
Amongst objects in the Social Thread exhibition such as embroidered Hungarian shawls, Hmong story cloths, and Polish lace runners, the Filipino tapis is an object with a deceptively heavy history. When I saw it in …
Student Spotlight: Experiencing “Questioning Things” by Sarah Egan
Experiencing “Questioning Things” on my first day back as a gallery assistant in the Center for Design and Material Culture was daunting. Having been gone for the summer, the exhibit was a surprise to me, …
Exhibition Spotlight: Lace from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection
PhD student in Design History, Maeve M. Hogan, discusses the curatorial vision for Lace in the Helen Louise Textile Collection, on view in the Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery, September 8 through November 17, 2021.
The “Politics at Home” Exhibit: An Origin Story
Sneak peek from co-curator Marina Moskowitz of the fall 2021 exhibit “Politics at Home: Textiles as American Politics” in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery.
2021 Design Studies Second Year MFA Exhibition
Online Launch: May 8, 2021. In the culmination of two years of work, Design Studies MFA candidates Henry Obeng and Nora Renick Rinehart present their work in two digital exhibitions representing recent installations in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery.
Henry Obeng: “The Trail”
Online Launch May 8, 2021. Inspired by botanical history, land use, and plant ecologies as they relate to us as citizens and noncitizens, this exhibition builds connections between Obeng’s experiences as a surveilled non-citizen and plant specimens in the UW–Madison Herbarium through hundreds of cyanotype images presented on handmade paper made from recycled Badger T-shirts.
Nora Renick Rinehart: “Flannel Futures”
Online Launch: May 8, 2021. “Flannel Futures” inquires into the making of memory, questions the perseverance of tradition versus the conjuring of new normals, and wonders how we will commemorate that which we have used to commemorate our own past from the vantage point of the future.
2021 Design Studies Master in Fine Arts Exhibition
Online Launch: April 16, 2021. In the culmination of three years of intensive work, Design Studies MFA candidates Amanda Thatch and Han-ah Yoo present their thesis work in two digital exhibitions representing recent installations in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery.