An NEH grant allowed Vassar to bring three professionals from the field of costume history to lead workshops for 13 undergraduate students and Drama Department faculty members and administrators. The students, many interested in museum work, received independent study credit for the workshops. Documentation of the continuing work on the collection is available at the website: http://pages.vassar.edu/hcpw/.
Workshop 1 – February 3: Featured textile consultants Jonathan Scheer and Rebecca Chartier of J. Scheer and Co. of Rhinebeck and New York, who introduced participants to the proper handling, storage, and record keeping of textiles and historic costumes.
Workshop 2 – February 12: Featured costume historian Jessa Krick, who taught participants best practices for cataloging historic costumes. She discussed her cataloging work with the Costume Documentation Project for the Brooklyn Museum. Then, working with an object from Vassar’s collection, she modeled how to write a detailed catalogue entry.
Workshop 3 – April 9 – 13: Led by Colleen Callahan, currently of Costume and Textile Specialists in VA and curator emeritus of costumes and textiles at the Valentine Richmond History Center in Richmond, Virginia, was based on successful workshops led by Callahan at Mt. Holyoke in 2006 and Smith in 2008. Participants worked in teams with several objects from the VCCC and performed the necessary sewing to stabilize each object and properly mount it on a mannequin.
Students also had the opportunity to work with Stuart Belli and Edie Stout of the Chemistry department, to learn how to use several instruments that can help with the analysis of textile fibers.
