The Larger Conversation: The Art of Self-Fashioning

Fabiola Jean-Louis was born in Port Au Prince, Haiti on September 10th, 1978 and moved as a child to Brooklyn, NY, where she currently works. She studied at the School of Fashion Industries in New York and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh; she now works in a variety of media—including sculpture, photography, ceramic, and film. She has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York City, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Her work has been exhibited at DuSable Museum of African American History, and Andrew Freedman Home. In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned a paper sculpture for a two year exhibition, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. It debuted on November 5th, 2021 - making her the first Haitian, female artist to show in the prestigious institution. That same year, the Yale Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, acquired Jean-Louis’s entire Rewriting History print collection - along with three paper sculptures.

Fabiola Jean-Louis, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

"Another fashion system is possible," says Mexican fashion designer Carla Fernández. She creates haute couture designs throughout Mexico. Fernández's work preserves and celebrates centuries-old textile techniques belonging to Indigenous communities and other popular and urban collectives in Mexico. At an early age she traveled with her father, then the director of museums and exhibits of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. Through this she learned about Mexico's diverse heritage and began collecting garments made by Indigenous and mestizo artisans. After studying art history and fashion design, Fernández turned her attention to traditional techniques of clothing construction in Mexico. Maintaining these techniques and imbuing them with innovation became the root of her practice. As she says: "To be original is to go back to the origin.” The Fashion House that she heads together with her partner Cristina Rangel, collaborates in the design and production processes with artisans across Mexico, by celebrating their living cultures, and by using the house’s global platform to promote social justice and fair trade.

Carla Fernández, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Horace D. Ballard (he/they) is the Theodore E. Stebbins Associate Curator of American art at the Harvard Art Museums. Prior to this role, he was Curator of American art at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). His research interests include the legibilities of gender and race in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century US portraiture; colonial men's fashion; and the visual and material cultures of religion in the Americas. Ballard received his doctorate in American visual culture from Brown University and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Virginia. He has held positions in the curatorial, education, and interpretation departments of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design, Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Horace D. Ballard, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

theo tyson [who uses she/they pronouns] is a curator who invites conversations about the sociocultural implications of race, gender, identity, and sexuality through a lens of fashion, art, and culture. Her practice focuses on creating sartorial spaces of reclamation and authority to share the powerful stories of Black women and those on the LGBTQI+ spectrum. theo privileges noncanonical ways of seeing, offering audiences poignant new perspectives from which to view the rich diversity of our humanity. Using the language of fashion, she unravels threads that put forward opportunities for deeper connections to the import and impact of clothing and dress. Their previous posts include Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, and the Boston Athenæum. Most recently, tyson co-curated an original exhibition Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and served as advising scholar for Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love at the Peabody Essex Museum. Currently, she is the Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Not coincidentally, tyson resides in an historic ‘shoe city’ of Massachusetts with their cat, Charlemagne Cousteau.

theo tyson, Photographer: Frances Neyra Claudio.