On Exhibit
In 1976, the only dedicated exhibition space for the teaching collection was a small hallway exhibit window on the third floor of the Gifford Building. In the late 1970s, an exhibition of women’s undergarments, curated by faculty member Antigone Kotsiopolus and her students, was installed in Morgan Library. But it was not until the mid-1980s, when a portion of the collection storage area was reconfigured into the Gustafson Gallery, that the collection was regularly exhibited to the public.
As a university teaching collection, the galleries provide a unique experience for students to gain exhibitions experience. In fact, many exhibitions over the years have been curated by students. When the Avenir Gallery in the University Center for the Arts opened in 2009, the first exhibition was curated by instructor and collections curator Linda Carlson and students in her graduate course Care and Exhibit of Museum Collections. Window to the World featured a broad sampling of the collection across time and place. Students researched objects, wrote labels, and assisted Linda, collections manager Megan Osborne, and guest preparator Jack Townes with the installation.
Several faculty members have also curated exhibitions using the historic clothing and textiles collection. In 1990, apparel design faculty member Dr. Diane Sparks and collector Mary Louisa Maxson worked together to curate the exhibition Kimono from Maxson’s extensive holdings of Japanese textiles and apparel. Maxson’s collection was donated to the university in 2004 and Sparks curated a second exhibition to mark the occasion.
Textile science professor Dr. Brenda Brandt and apparel design professor Dr. Eulanda Sanders curated several exhibitions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their faculty exhibitions included a range of topics from the evolution of women’s suits in the 1900s to original designs created by Sanders inspired by historic garments from the collection and the biography of Crimean War nurse Mary Seacole.
Community volunteers have also curated many of the exhibitions of the collection. To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995, the Friends of the Gustafson Gallery worked together to plan the major exhibition and event Fateful Forties held at the One West Art Center in downtown Fort Collins. In more recent years, community volunteers have helped to fill the expanded number of galleries at the museum with exhibitions of Moroccan caftans and a fashion history of the color orange. Their 2018 exhibit Nothing to Sneeze At: One Woman, 1,107 Handkerchiefs was one of the most popular recent exhibitions at the museum.
Whether curated by students, faculty, volunteers, or collection curators, one constant presence in the exhibition installations from 1986 to 2016 was Jack Curfman. A faculty member in the interior design and art programs at CSU, Curfman designed dozens of exhibitions featuring the museum’s collection.
“He was a master at designing the space and always looked for a surprise. You want people to have to go in and discover a surprise, something around the corner that they haven’t anticipated….I used to just get out the stuff and say, ‘This is what I want to do. This is the story I want to tell.’ And Jack would start ideating and he’d come up with little pencil drawings of what we were going to build and how we were going to do it and he would start working.”
- Curator Emerita Linda Carlson in 2019 oral interview
Since the opening of the Gustafson Gallery in 1987, approximately 75 exhibitions of the collection have been mounted in locations both on and off campus. Today, the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising’s main facility includes three distinct gallery spaces, allowing expanded opportunities for exhibiting the collection.
We hope you have enjoyed these Stories curated from our archives.