Event 1 at Queens College:
Workshop by Artist and Sculptor Shelby Head (Shelbyhead.com) on how to transform a T- Shirt or a discarded garment into another object to wear or into a work of art. This is part of a mandatory hands on project that students have to produce by the end of the semester. This seminar is a preparation to get students started. Workshop takes place at Queens College on September 21 st during class time and will extend for part of the free hour.
Event 2 and 3 at the Graduate Center:
Workshop with designer Tabitha St. Bernard (Tabii Just/Zero Waste) based in Brooklyn, NY: http://tabiijust.com/pages/about-2. Tabi illustrated students her brand and how she applies her concern for sustainability and ethical design to her collections. This was another hands on workshop where students interacted with the designer and brought their work started in Workshop 1 or started a new one. In the second workshop, students finished their project and presented it to the class. Students explored issues of labor and how to price their item. Events took place at the Graduate Center involving undergraduate and graduate students together. November 9 and November 30, 2016
For designer and Women’s March organizer Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs, responsible fashion isn’t just the way of the future it’s what will determine the industry’s legacy.
Macaela McKenzie, Forbes, September 13, 2017
Event 4 at Queens College:
Workshop with Carol Francis-Blackman, Assistant Registrar at Queens College. Ms Francis- Blackman gave a demonstration of cutting out a Kaftan from a pattern. The fabric was multicolored silk donated to the class by Jo Ann Lynch. This was one of the scraps from textile samples of very well known Italian luxury textile factories such as “ClericiTessuto” and https://vimeo.com/111116457. The brand was founded by Rachele Clerici and her husband Alessandro Tessuto in 1923 and it is located in Grandate, Como. The other brand is “Mantero.” founded in Como by Riccardo Mantero in 1903.
The Como area, where both factories are located, is a well known area for the design and production of high quality fabrics for clothing, accessories and home furnishings used by designers all over the world.
The kaftan made with a Mantero fabric, will be sewn in the Spring of 2017 and will be exhibited together with some samples of the textiles from Clerici Tessuto and Mantero.
Event 5 at Queens College:
Workshop with Kat Roberts, one of the MA students in the Fabric of Cultures class taught at the Graduate Center.
These workshops are key for the completion of students project and pedagogic plan for the class that will lead to the exhibition at the Art Center in the Fall 2017 where the best of students’ work will be on view.
Meeting of NEMLA 2017, Baltimore Johns Hopkins University
March 2017
Eugenia Paulicelli will give a presentation of the “Fabric of Cultures: A Research and Pedagogic Lab.” Her presentation is part of a round table on the same topic she has organized at the conference. Other speakers who submitted their papers include:
“Fashion, Embroidery, Ethnicity, and Technomediations of ‘Folk,’ Anne Cieko, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“‘Your mother had sewn so many things for you’: Sewing Motherhood in Claire of the Sea Light” Sarah George, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
“Objects of Desire: Mapping Fashion Accessories in 19th-century Latin America” Ines Corujo Martin, Georgetown University
“Hijab as Resistance: Postcolonial Feminisms in Noor Tagouri’s Playboy Interview” Mehra Gharibian, University of California, Irvine
