Faculty News: Karen Kramer Curates Peabody Essex Museum Exhibit

February 8, 2016

Montserrat College of Art faculty member Karen Kramer recently curated the Native Fashion Now exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum Exhibit. The show is open now through March 6, 2016.

The show was featured in Hyperallergetic!

The Fiercely Contemporary Aesthetic of Today’s Native American Fashion Designers by Haley ED Houseman

Do not walk into Native Fashion Now expecting fringes and buckskin. These traditional materials can be found around the gallery, but the focus of this exhibit is firmly contemporary, featuring repurposed computer parts and daring plasticine as much as glass beadwork and silver jewelry.

Native fashion is as much about innovation as it is about passing on a tradition, a balance suggested by both the artists and the curation of this exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts. The show features work from a vast array of Native fashion designers and jewelers, almost all of whom are creating right now, contributing to the vitality of Native expression privately, for the community, and for public consumption. Their work navigates between public and private, a balance where tradition explicitly dictates what can and cannot be commercia

Spanning 50 years of Native fashion designers, the exhibit is constructed in four parts. “Pathbreakers” features those who brought Native creativity to fashion early on, inspiring a generation of designers and creating an appetite for work that expanded what it meant to design as Native Americans. This section is followed by “Revisitors,” featuring designers whose work constructs a dialogue with both Native and non-Native designers. The “Activators” section bring the concerns of Native design to everyday fashion like streetwear, and “Provocateurs,” the final section, draw on all possible parts of the design conversation to bring fashion unapologetically in new directions.Native Fashion Now aims to direct the discourse away from imitation, appropriation, or even flattering emulation, allowing for the artists to set the tone. Curator Karen Kramer and her team worked with many advisors, including featured designer Patricia Michaels, Boston Fashion Week founder Jay Calderin, fashion scholar Francesca Granata, and Beyond Buckskin founder Jessica Metcalfe. The exhibit aims to showcase the adaptive and creative talents of Native designers who have always looked beyond mainstream stereotypes to form their identity as creators. As Michaels told Hyperallergic, “It feeds our soul to take risks as artists.”

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