LaGuardia Community College and Bard Graduate Center are proud to present Connecting Threads: Fashioning Identity in a Global World, Part 2, a digital exhibition designed and curated by LaGuardia students in collaboration with Bard Graduate Center staff.

In Fall 2020, Professor Filip Stabrowski’s Cultural Anthropology (Honors) students from LaGuardia selected and studied objects of clothing and fashion to which they felt connected. The students’ papers and photos, included in this exhibition, attempted to go behind the label and fabric, exploring the social relationships required to produce, consume, dispose of, and reuse these powerful objects.

In Spring 2021, a new group of students in Professor Liena Vayzman’s Urban Study: Art and Society (Honors) course curated the presentation of these objects to the public by writing the object descriptions and participating in the design of the exhibition. The Art and Society students created Self-Portrait artworks as part of a workshop co-sponsored by Transformative Learning in the Humanities at CUNY and wrote Artist Statements to present their own voices and identities. The objects on display are thus manifestations of social connections of a different sort.

Connecting Threads invites you, the viewer, to enter into the social lives of these objects, to write yourselves into their biographies. Though we are unable to form and build upon these relationships in person, still we are able to connect. The exhibition may be virtual (and our connecting threads may be fiber-optic), but the connections remain very real.