Thank you to all of you who joined "The Art of Masks" talk yesterday. As explained in the previous post, the event, the eighth "Reinventing the Wheel" talk, was an expanded version of "The Art of Masks" series organised by curator Caroline Kipp that appears in the current issue of The Journal of Modern Craft (14.1, April 2021).
For all those of you who weren't there, but who are interested in the theme of masks, the event is now available on YouTube at this link.
There's something for everybody in the event, from health and sustainability issues (Caroline Kipp, the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.) to a focus on arts and crafts with some wonderful beaded masks to demonstrate resilience over the pandemic (introduced by Maegen Black, Director of the Canadian Crafts Federation) and to connections with politics (check out Kate Kretz's #bullyculture project and her artwork, like the dismembered MAGA hats reconfigured into a Ku Klux Klan hood).
In some cases we rediscovered masks from the past (for example fashionable or plague masks from the 1600s with Dr. Alison Matthews David, writer and historian of dress and textiles, author of Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present and Killer Style: How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed and Murdered Through History) and looked at modern masks by popular brands or luxury fashion houses (with Professor Andrew Groves and Dr. Danielle Specher, curators of the online exhibition "Undercover - From Necessity to Debris: The Pollution of Face Coverings During COVID-19").
My presentation - "A Year of Masks, A Year in a Mask: The Masked Identity in the Time of Coronavirus" - was a sort of round-up of some of the posts I worked on last year when my perspective on masks completely changed. We usually think about masks as something to create another identity or to protect our anonymity, but with COVID-19 they turned into an essential item to protect ourselves and others from Coronavirus. During the pandemic we also started using masks to express ourselves in creative or political ways and fashion and art reclaimed and reappropriated the concept of the mask, coming up with new versions or with special projects revolving around the themes of protection. Kevin Murray editor of Garland Magazine acted as moderator of the talk. Enjoy the recording of the event and thank you for watching.
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