Director’s Foreword

Weber, Susan

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Director’s Foreword

Susan Weber

Description: An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design,...

An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928

The twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Bard Graduate Center is the appropriate occasion to highlight achievements by former students...

Author

Susan Weber

PublisherBard Graduate Center

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21662

Director’s Foreword

The twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Bard Graduate Center is the appropriate occasion to highlight achievements by former students. Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, curator of An American Style, was awarded the Clive Wainwright Prize for the best master’s thesis of 2011 for “Intimately and Unquestionably Our Own”: The American Museum of Natural History and Its Influence on American Textile and Fashion Industries, 1915–1927.” She was subsequently appointed assistant curator at the BGC, and was recently promoted to associate curator in recognition of her outstanding work on a series of both Main Gallery and Focus Gallery exhibitions. As we celebrate twenty years of innovative work in all divisions of the BGC, it seems only fitting that we should turn to the work of one who is “intimately and unquestionably our own.”

In An American Style, Ms. Tartsinis tells the story of how a group of curators at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) encouraged a number of New York textile and fashion designers to seek inspiration among the fabrics, garments, and other artifacts in the museum’s ethnographic collections. An emerging American national self-confidence and cultural particularism prompted New York designers to turn to Indigenous American materials and, later, more global artifacts as sources at a time when the French fashion and the German dyestuffs industries were both critically disrupted by the First World War. Rather than continuing to be in thrall to Europe, New Yorkers made a virtue of what was immediately at hand to produce designs that were distinctively American. The AMNH played a central role in this development. The high point of the story Ms. Tartsinis tells is the Exhibition of Industrial Art in Textiles and Costumes held at the AMNH in 1919. Designers exhibited their new fabrics and garments alongside some of the items in the museum’s collections that had inspired them in alcoves temporarily installed in the museum’s Eastern Woodlands and Plains Indians Halls.

Ms. Tartsinis has drawn on the AMNH Division of Anthropology collections, and on the AMNH Research Library Special Collections (Institutional Archives, Manuscripts, and Personal Papers, and the Photograph Collection). This project marks a further development of the special relationship between the BGC and the AMNH that has seen the appointment of three successive BGC–AMNH postdoctoral fellows, significant collaborative teaching, research opportunities at the AMNH for BGC students, and the realization of two previous Focus Gallery exhibitions with a third in preparation for spring 2014. I should therefore like to acknowledge our debt to Ellen V. Futter, president of the AMNH, for the loans from the museum’s collections and archives that have made the exhibition possible. The chair of the AMNH Division of Anthropology, Laurel Kendall, lent invaluable support. Kristen Mable, Division of Anthropology registrar for archives and loans, and Barbara Mathé, AMNH archivist and head of Library Special Collections, generously facilitated access to archival correspondence and the unparalleled collection of museum negatives, without which this project would not have been possible.

In addition to the AMNH, numerous institutional lenders were essential to the realization of An American Style. Significant examples of early twentieth-century textile and fashion design have been lent by the Allentown Art Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. I would especially like to thank Barry Harwood, curator of decorative arts at the Brooklyn Museum, and Harold Koda, curator-in-charge of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for their generous assistance with this process. A special expression of gratitude must be given to Solveig Cox, daughter of Mariska Karasz, and Ilonka Sigmund, granddaughter of Ilonka Karasz, for sharing their private collections for exhibition research and loans.

I am especially proud that Ms. Tartsinis’s example as an outstanding graduate of the BGC master’s program is ever before our current students, particularly Alison Kowalski and Sophia Lufkin, who assisted in the preparation of the biographies of those who figure in Ms. Tartsinis’s story, as well as Ms. Kowalski and Zahava Friedman-Stadler, who provided invaluable assistance with research and writing for the digital media components and exhibition texts.

Nina Stritzler-Levine, director of the BGC Gallery and Gallery Publications proposed that Ms. Tartsinis’s thesis be the subject of a Focus Gallery exhibition. The dean of the Bard Graduate Center, Peter Miller, continues to sustain the collaboration between the Gallery and the Academic Programs department of the BGC. This collaboration alone makes the Focus Gallery Project possible. His support is complemented by the contributions of Elena Pinto Simon, dean of Academic Administration and Student Affairs; Nina Stritzler-Levine; and Ivan Gaskell, professor and head of the Focus Gallery Project, who oversaw the endeavor. Many BGC staff members collaborated to realize Ms. Tartsinis’s concept: Rebecca Allan, head of Education; Eric Edler, Gallery registrar; Laura Grey, former art director; Kimon Keramidas, assistant professor and director for the Digital Media Lab; Marianne Lamonaca, associate Gallery director and chief curator; Alexis Mucha, coordinator of catalogue photography; Ian Sullivan, exhibition designer; and Han Vu, media producer. MediaCombo, led by Robin White Owen, developed the digital interactive that explores the 1919 Exhibition of Industrial Art through archival photographs and period texts. The production of this catalogue was aided by the diligent work of our copyeditor, Mary Christian, and proofreader, Charmain Devereaux. I should like to thank them all, as well as all other members of the faculty and staff of the Bard Graduate Center whose support has made An American Style possible.

—Susan Weber
Director and Founder
Iris Horowitz Professor in the History of the Decorative Arts
Bard Graduate Center

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