Kate Irvin

Kate Irvin is curator and head of the department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum. There she oversees a collection of 30,000 fashion and textile items that range in date from 1500 BCE to the present and represent traditions and innovations from across the globe.

Her most recent exhibition Sensing Fashion (2023) was curated in collaboration with Associate Professor Lisa Z. Morgan (Apparel Design) and Alexandra Emberley (RISD MFA 2023, Textiles), an experimental consideration of a selection of contemporary designer fashions through the amplifying lenses of a digital microscope, a roving camera and a digital embroidery machine, to create a place of immersive intimacy. In 2022–23, Irvin co-curated the initiative Inherent Vice with textile conservators Jessica Urick and Anna Rose Keefe, a project that comprised a yearlong exhibition, deaccessioning and other collections-care activities, community-building conversations and related RISD courses and creative output produced therein. As a whole, the project reframed collections care as a reparative, empathetic act that embraces both literal and metaphorical cracks as opportunities for revealing and making room for neglected narratives.

Previously Irvin curated Repair and Design Futures (2018–19), another yearlong multidisciplinary exhibition and programming initiative that investigated mending as material intervention, metaphor and call to action. With Markus Berger, she co-edited a related book Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, published by Routledge in 2022.

Other exhibitions and projects at the RISD Museum include: From the Loom of a Goddess: Reverberations of Guatemalan Maya Weaving (2018); Designing Traditions: Student Explorations in the Asian Textile Collections (2017); All of Everything: Todd Oldham Fashion (2016); and Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion (2013).