Curating Community: Centering Collaboration, Public Engagement, Social Justice, and Empowerment Within the Fashion Museum

Abstract

North American dress and textile museums have long been rooted in colonial ideals due to the long-standing perpetuation of Eurocentrism as superior to all other ways of knowing. The fashion and textile art exhibition Material Resistance: Social Justice and Empowerment Narratives Told Through Cloth (2022), curated by graduate students, contested these colonial traditions and instead centered the stories, lived experiences, and empowerment of marginalized communities. The exhibition featured social justice-focused textile works of five artists and three community organizations. The curatorial team explored methods to re-envision how curators can center social justice and empowerment within fashion and textile exhibitions through innovative approaches, building upon previous curatorial scholarship that values collaboration and combines tenets of post-critical museology, intersectionality, and self-determination. By prioritizing the voices of the show’s artists and community members, being intentional about the curatorial selection and accessibility, providing opportunities for community engagement, and practicing repatriation, we provide an example of curatorial practice centering the people, not the system that has often disenfranchised them.