Conceptualizing a year-long exhibition and RISD studio course through deaccessioning efforts, collections care initiatives, and community-building conversations at RISD Museum.
“Inherent vice, also known as inherent fault, is the tendency in an object or material to deteriorate or self-destruct because of its intrinsic internal characteristics, including weak construction, poor quality or unstable materials, and incompatibility of different materials within an object.”
—American Institute for Conservation (2021)
Born at
More than 90% of the RISD Museum’s Costume and Textile collection is in storage, and over the years, many artifacts have become structurally compromised. Despite the museum’s meticulous galleries, the Gilded Age garments were stacks of shattered silks, dry-rotting cotton, degraded net, and corroded beads—all examples of inherent vice. Instead of leaving these garments in storage, (as they were too fragile to teach from or exhibit) or pouring resources into stabilizing them (which would financially burden the institution), we decided to approach the problem as an avenue for new methods of instruction, exploration and understandings.
The garments were given to students to conduct exploratory research through— to use them, to touch them, to tear them, and to learn in this process of hand-on experimentation and research. As a result, a year-long exhibition was designed for the Donghia Galleries of the RISD Museum.
This skirt is a dossier of thoughts, a parchment which served as a space for colonial catharsis. The process of archiving and cataloging through drawing, doodling, scribing, and scribbling created a map which pays homage to the 400,000 farmers who took their lives. Each of them, part of this topography which hopes to bring humanism into data representation through mapping.
Project through RISD, 12 weeks
Historical research, archiving, conservation, photography, exhibition design, community engagement, writing
Project undertaken as a Research Assistant at
Lead by Kate Irvin, Anna Rose Keefe, Jessica Urick
Taught by Lisa Morgan
Images Courtesy of RISD Museum