Kate Irvin

Curator and Head, Costume & Textiles
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Kate Irvin
BA, Brown University

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).

Courses

Spring 2025 Courses

LAEL 1082-01 - NARRATIVES OF GLOBAL TEXTILES: IDENTITY AND LABOR IN PROCESS
Level Undergraduate
Unit Textiles
Subject Liberal Arts Elective
Period Spring 2025
Credits 3
Format Lecture
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date

LAEL 1082-01

NARRATIVES OF GLOBAL TEXTILES: IDENTITY AND LABOR IN PROCESS

Level Undergraduate
Unit Textiles
Subject Liberal Arts Elective
Period Spring 2025
Credits 3
Format Lecture
Mode In-Person
Start and End 2025-02-13 to 2025-05-23
Times: W | 9:40 AM - 12:40 PM Instructor(s): Bhasha Chakrabarti, Kate Irvin Location(s): College Building, Room 331 Enrolled / Capacity: 15 Status: Closed

SECTION DESCRIPTION

This course explores the tangled histories, patchworked mythologies, and the global (im)possibilities of textiles in the modern world. The textile histories covered will spiral through the 18th to 21st centuries, and, through individual case studies, will consider narratives of identity, labor, and process they express well beyond their regionality. Rethinking the “History of” survey model, we will investigate how deep research leads to holistic perspectives as we uncover global networks of knowledge-sharing embedded within specific “regional” textile crafts. 

These narratives will unfold from objects selected from the collections of the RISD Museum that will be made available for consideration and study at close range with curators. The firsthand experiences will be guided and enriched by guest lectures and workshops by visiting scholars and artists whose work centers on the particular histories examined, as well as field trips. Through active engagement with tangible objects and exposure to a plurality of voices, students in the course not only will gain an embodied understanding of the global (im)possibilities of textile histories, but also will find space for moving through and beyond colonial inheritances.

Textiles Students can be pre-registered by the department.

Elective

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Kate Irvin
BA, Brown University