Fashion Columbia Study Collection Exhibition Cases
Columbia College Chicago's Fashion Columbia Study Collection will open Fashion Victims: AIDS in the 80s, a fashion exhibit that brings awareness to the early losses to the fashion industry caused by HIV/AIDS. The exhibit is a tribute to the work of four major American designers who fell victim to the disease. These prominent figures in the fashion industry faced untimely deaths without the possibility of reaching their full creative potential. They left behind a legacy of innovative work that has influenced and enhanced the meaning of fashion and style today.
The exhibit will open on March 16 and run through August 24, 2007. An opening reception will be held on Tuesday, March 27 from 5-7 p.m. at Columbia College Chicago, Conaway Center, Fashion Columbia Study Collection Exhibition Cases, 1104 S. Wabash Avenue, 1st Floor.
Gallery hours are: Monday through Thursday: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The initial media focus on people with HIV/AIDS was on those in the public eye: actors, musicians, artists and fashion designers. On May 30, 1986, Perry Ellis was one of the first designers to die of AIDS, at the age of 46. In February 1987, African American fashion designer Willi Smith was in India working on fabrics and designs. He contracted shigella, a parasitic disease that causes dysentery. His health declined rapidly and he was hospitalized with pneumonia in April. Two days later he died. He was 39 years old. A subsequent autopsy revealed that he had AIDS. Within a short time, the list of those who lost their lives to the disease continued to grow at a rapid pace. A 1990 article in "Time"? magazine declared that "The industry's creative energy is being dissipated and diminished by AIDS."
Each designer's garment in the exhibit is representative of their unique modern vision and design style. All four designers have a panel in their honor on the original NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—the largest ongoing community arts project in the world. A photo reproduction of their panels will be included in the exhibit.
Perry Ellis (March 3, 1940 - May 30, 1986) began his fashion career designing for department stores. In 1978 he founded his company and began designing women's sportswear and accessories. Ellis launched a men's sportswear line in 1980 that reflected a casual, elegant sportswear designed specifically for the affluent American male. By the mid-80s his brand was synonymous with sophisticated, preppy style. He served as the first president of the fashion industry's premiere organization, Council of Fashion Designers of America. His legacy for timeless, modern clothes and accessories continues today as a national brand bearing his name.
Halston (Roy Halston Frowick) (April 23, 1932 — March 26, 1990) moved to New York in 1958 and began designing hats and clothing for Bergdorf Goodman department store. At Bergdorf he created several distinctive styles, most notably the pillbox hat Jacqueline Kennedy wore to her husband's inauguration. He opened his first salon in 1968 and became one of the acclaimed designers of the 1970s. His designs were classically simple, elegant and chic. He introduced ultra suede, popularized cashmere twin sets, caftan, the halter dress, shirtwaist, spiral skirt and knee-length pants. Halston's influence went beyond style to reshape the business of fashion as he was one of the first designers to realize the potential of licensing his name with a department store, JC Penney.
Patrick Kelly (September 24, 1954ish - January 1, 1990) kept his exact birth year a secret. He stated more than once that he would never tell his age because he hoped to always be the new kid on the block. Kelly came from a working-class African American family. He taught himself to sew and began designing and sewing clothes as a teenager in Mississippi. In his 20s, he moved to Paris, started his own design company and established himself as a reputable designer. His clothes were colorful, fun, exotic and unusual and often had a Southern influence. He decorated dresses with colorful bows, gardenias and polka-dot bananas, embroidered lips and hearts and billiard balls. Kelly was known for his watermelon brooches, but his trademark was his large, bright plastic buttons. He was the first American to be allowed into the elite Parisian fashion designer's organization called Chambre Syndicale.
Willi Smith's (February 29, 1948 - April 17, 1987) design philosophy was to design clothing that was stylish, fun yet affordable. In 1976 Smith went into business with Laurie Mallet and they co-founded WilliWear. Mallett financed a trip to India so that they could buy materials and create their first collection. The only fabric available was cotton. They were unable to find buttons which led them to design wrap-around coats. Their initial 12-piece collection had what would become hallmarks of Willi Smith designs: natural fabrics, a relaxed comfortable fit, colorful and eye-catching material and a reasonable price tag.
Virginia Heaven, Curator, Fashion Columbia Study Collection and Fashion Retail Management Faculty. Virginia is available for interviews.
Fashion Columbia Study Collection was founded in 1989 to serve as a teaching tool for fashion design and fashion retail management students. Over the years the collection and its uses have grown to include an interdisciplinary approach to teaching history, technology and aesthetics.
Fashion Victims: AIDS in the 80s is just one example of Columbia's Critical Encounters initiative, whereby the college commits one year to explore, educate and engage in a specific global issue.
During the first year, through both classroom initiatives and public programs, Columbia has been examining the problem of HIV & AIDS, looking at the history and current status of the disease.
MEDIA CONTACT: Priscilla L. Hunter, 312.344.7805, 312.286.6624 (cell) or phunter@colum.edu
March, 2007 --The Modernist artist, Romare Bearden, was recognized as one of the most original voices of the twentieth century. He experimented with many different media and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages depicting universal images using African American subjects. In 1970, Bearden co-founded the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972. He closely associated with the artists, intellectuals and musicians of his era: Stuart Davis, Joan Miro, George Grosz, Alvin Ailey, Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Bearden's work is included in many important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
Initiated in 1998, the Bearden National Symposium series encourages and supports new scholarship on Bearden at colleges and universities across the country. Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition, Friday, April 20, 2007 from 5:30 pm to 9:00pm and Saturday, April 21, 2007 from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm, will be presented at Columbia College Chicago at the Film Row Cinema Theater and Conaway Center, 1104 S. Wabash Avenue, 8th and 1st Floors, Chicago, Illinois. Registration for this free symposium can be completed at www.colum.edu/romarebearden or for more information contact Andrew Whatley at 312.344.7886.
"Bearden blazed a path for all artists," says Dawoud Bey, professor of photography at Columbia and project coordinator for the Bearden symposium. "His work talked about universal issues, but he was insistent upon using black subjects. The image of a mother and child is universal. The image of a black mother and child is not any more or less universal."
Kobena Mercer, PhD., Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University in London, will be the keynote speaker. Dr. Mercer is the author of Romare Bearden: African American Modernism at Mid-Century in Art History and Romare Bearden, 1964 Collage as Kunstwollen. His topics include research on Bearden's lifelong dialogue with Picasso as a key aspect of his relation to modernist tradition. He will emphasize how Bearden's dialogue actively translates post-Cubist pictorial space into Afro-Diasporic contexts, where function of dialogue underpins call and response in music and serial improvisation in jazz. Through this approach he will critique conventional notions of classifying Bearden and fellow African American modernists into strict chronologically and stylistically based categories. He will also show that such dialogues fruitfully cross the borders of the literary and the visual such that Bearden's dialogue with Ralph Ellison is on par with Picasso and Gertrude Stein or Breton or Miro. Another example of Bearden in dialogue with literature was his relation to Nobel Laureate, Derek Wolcott's poems during the 1980s, which Dr. Mercer will present as more than mere illustration but as inter-media dialogue. Addressing how images travel in the Afro-Diasporic imagination, he will discuss South African artists of the 1970s and 80s - Sam Nhlengethwa and Kay Hassan who use collage as critical re-cycling, 'signifying' on aspects of apartheid and highlighting a public sphere crossed by structural boundaries. This keynote address was used to outline the structure of the symposium. The topics for presentation are grouped thematically and are roughly chronological.
The first topic in Romare Bearden In the Modernist Tradition examines Bearden's practice in relation to early modernism and the artists and artistic movements that influenced him, for example, his formal art training with Georg Grosz and his interest in Dada and life-long exploration of Cubism. And his abiding interest in world art from Africa, Asia and Europe. African art is of special interest as a topic, as a fundamental influence on the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, and as art forms from which Bearden "quoted" and which he greatly admired.
Bearden combined the above influences with elements of African American vernacular in his work, creating a visual form whose elements Ralph Ellison said "characterized much of African American history." The friendship between artist and author is but one of several significant ongoing dialogues between Bearden and fellow artists, writers and musicians. Through this second group of topics the presenters will examine the interchange between Bearden and his peers. A proposed interview with artist and Spiral Group members Emma Amos will provide the history of the group that was formed, in part, as a response by African American artists to the growing Civil Rights Movement. Spiral Group, established in 1963, also included Hale Woodruff and Norman Lewis, and was the setting of Bearden's "break through," his adoption of collage as his primary mode of artistic expression.
The next category of presentations will examine Bearden's influence on subsequent generations of artists as a towering figure in African American art who sought, through his aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, to mediate between representing African American culture and following the tenets of modernism. They will also examine the far-reaching influence of Bearden in the African Diaspora.
The last category of topics examines Bearden's use of photography, Photostat and other technology through the lens of post-modernist discourse and practice. In performances and exhibitions, artists and musicians appropriate images and sample and loop sounds from multiple sources, blurring the lines between different media and defying categorization. Scholars and artists will discuss Bearden as bricoleur, and his influence on contemporary practice.
Symposium Presenters: Kobena Mercer, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Department of Visual Culture and Media, Middlesex University; Emma Amos, Artist, Professor of Art, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University; Radcliffe Bailey, Artist, Assistant Professor of Art, Lamar Dodd School, University of Georgia; Dawoud Bey, Artist, Professor of Photography, Columbia College Chicago; Melvin Edwards, Artist, Professor of Art (ret.), Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University; Geoffrey Jacques, Ph.D., Poet and Critic, Faculty of English Department, Lehman College, City University of New York; Greg Foster Rice, Ph.D., Art History, Assistant Professor, Art History, Columbia College Chicago; Courtney Martin, Ph.D. candidate, Art History, Yale University; Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Conceptual artist, writer, and musician; Amy Mooney, Ph.D., Professor, Art History, Columbia College Chicago; Robert O'Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of American Literature and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University; Kym Pinder, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Master of Arts in Art History program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Raél Jero Salley, Ph.D. candidate, The University of Chicago, The Committee on the History of Culture. Adjunct Faculty, Columbia College Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Helen Shannon, Ph.D., Art History, Director of Museum Education, University of the Arts, Philadelphia; William T. Williams, Artist, Professor of Art, Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
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