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Installation view of Repair and Design Futures on view 10-05-2018 through 06-30-2019 at the RISD Museum.

Repair and Design Futures

October 5, 2018 - June 30, 2019
Installation view of Repair and Design Futures on view 10-05-2018 through 06-30-2019 at the RISD Museum.

Introduction

Repair is the creative destruction of brokenness.

-Elizabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World

Repair, a humble act born of necessity, expresses resistance to the unmaking of our world and the environment. This exhibition and programming series, Repair and Design Futures, investigates mending as material intervention, metaphor, and call to action. Spanning the globe and more than three centuries, these objects reveal darns, patches, and stabilized areas that act as springboards to considering socially engaged design thinking today. Repair invites renewed forms of social exchange and offers alternative, holistic ways of facing environmental and social breakdown.

On display in this multiuse gallery space are costume and textile objects from the collections of the RISD Museum and Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. In Café Pearl (at the Benefit Street entrance) and the Donghia Costume and Textile Gallery and Study Center (sixth floor), related exhibitions investigate additional approaches to repair. Through this informal, expansive format, we hope to encourage engagement across a broad spectrum of perspectives.

Kate Irvin

Curator, Costume and Textiles Department

RISD Museum

Kate Irvin

Exhibition images

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Events

  • Talks and Conversations

Repairing for the Future

Lessons from Mended Textiles
September 25, 2020 / 12-1 pm
  • Performances and Screenings /
  • Screening

Ruffles, Repair & Ritual

the Fine Art of Fixing
October 17, 2019 / 6-8:30 pm
  • Talks and Conversations

Stitching Life into Old Clothes

June 22, 2019 / 1-3 pm
  • Performances and Screenings

Beyond Repair

June 20, 2019 / 7-7:30 pm
  • Talks and Conversations /
  • Workshops and studios

Expressive Repair

Interactive Mending
June 18, 2019 / 12-2:30 pm
  • Talks and Conversations /
  • Workshops and studios

Expressive Repair

Interactive Mending
June 16, 2019 / 2-4 pm
  • More events +

Publications

  • Journal

Manual / Issue 11: Repair

Can we find in the detail, in the stitch and the weave, an ecology of care, a model for activating new forms of life, ones that might reject or reimagine an economic and cultural order based on novelty, disposability, and the monadic self? Can they help us learn to live together in a broken world?

-Brian Goldberg and Kate Irvin, from the preface to Issue 11

Introduction: Barry Schwabsky on painting and repair

Articles

The Back Side Story: A Conversation with Chilean Arpilleras

The Back Side Story is a textile book/zine that, with cute and brightly-colored patchwork and embroidery, documents the civilians daily life, sufferings, and resilience under the Chinese government's zero-Covid policy.

Break Pot: Benefit Street: Performed on 11.08.2018

Amy Lee Sanford, a Cambodian-American artist, evokes individual, social, and cultural repair in this powerful performance.

Videos

Video

Art Aperitif

Video

Conversation / Ruffles, Repair & Ritual

Video

Decolonizing Design, Imagining Alternative Futures

Video

Objects in Inventory Land

Related Objects

No Image Available

Unknown Maker, English

Sock

Adele Stafford

VOI Shirt (Agrarian Twill no. 6 of 8)

G-Star RAW

Jeans

G-Star RAW

RAW for the Oceans Jacket

Mary Schenck Woolman

A Sewing Course

Unknown Maker, Portuguese

Furnishing Textile
  • More objects +

Repair and Design Futures

October 5, 2018 - June 30, 2019
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