Staged Fashion: Wonder and the Culture of Display
The Iris Foundation Awards Lecture by Matthew Yokobosky (Brooklyn Museum)

The earliest museums were not organized around “art” as we understand it today; they were cabinets of curiosities—assemblages of shells, minerals, and botanical specimens valued for their beauty, rarity, taxonomic value, and capacity to render the world legible through material form. Matthew Yokobosky, a 2026 Iris Foundation Award recipient, draws from his own exhibition practice to examine how contemporary designers—such as Iris van Herpen—reconfigure the gallery as a twenty-first-century cabinet of wonders, which is activated by curatorial structure as well as the embodied presence of viewers whose looking completes and continually reanimates the work.

April 28, 2026 at 6pm
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall