Join us for a conversation with four contributors to Fashion’s Missing Masses, a new book that explores the most pressing issues regarding diversity in the display of dress, edited by BGC PhD candidate Kenna Libes. This special Tuesday Tea panel—which includes Libes and fellow PhD candidate Angela Hermano Crenshaw, along with Michelle McVicker (Antonio Ratti Textile Study and Storage Center) and Wafa Ghnaim (The Tatreez Institute)—will discuss the collaborative and social dimensions of scholarship, and the ways this project intersects with their larger individual research practices.

Angela Hermano Crenshaw is an art historian, curator, and educator specializing in dress and textiles. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where she earned her MA in 2024. Her work focuses on American receptions of the Philippines in the US colonial period via material objects, particularly textiles. Angela received her undergraduate degree in Art History from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and has held positions at Providence College Galleries and the RISD Museum, where she also curated the exhibition “From Pineapple to Pañuelo: Philippine Textiles.”

Wafa Ghnaim is a Palestinian dress historian, embroiderer, educator, and the founder of the Tatreez Institute. She is the author of Tatreez & Tea (2016) and THOBNA (2023), and a former research scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is now Senior Research Fellow at the Museum of the Palestinian People for the Mellon Foundation funded project, Bayt wa Balad: Home & Homeland.

Kenna Libes is a PhD candidate in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. She has worked in museums and nonprofits in collections management, textile conservation, and curation, and has Master’s degrees in fashion history and museum studies from Brown University and the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology. Her current areas of research include the dress cultures of marginalized populations in the fashion history canon with a focus on the historical intersections of body size and dress. She also studies historiography and the composition of collections and exhibitions to understand the production of the past and its influence on the present. She has published in the journals Dress and Fashion and Style & Popular Culture and contributed to exhibitions internationally.

Michelle McVicker is an Associate Collections Specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Study and Storage Center at The Met. She previously held positions at El Museo del Barrio, The Museum at FIT, The Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and The Costume Institute. She has published academically on fashion history, intangible heritage, and how to proactively intervene gaps within museum costume collections. Michelle holds an MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design.

Tuesday, September 29, 12:15 pm

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
Tea, coffee, and snacks will be served starting at noon.
No registration required.