Fast Fashion / Slow Art

• Encourages dialogue on controversial issues affecting the fashion industry, global economy, environment and popular culture
• Features contemporary film, installations and performance art and an insightful, thought-provoking text
• Accompanies an exhibition at The Textile Museum and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine

This provocative publication focuses on videos by contemporary artists and filmmakers that encourage scrutiny of contemporary textile production and distribution. Is it possible to protect workers’ rights and ensure safe working conditions while keeping up with consumer demands? Can design and technology offer sustainable solutions to the environmental effects of fast fashion? What role do art and popular culture have in raising consumer consciousness? These questions and more will spark conversations about issues such as the merits of the local and tailor-made versus the global mass production of fast fashion.

Fast Fashion / Slow Art accompanies an exhibition at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum in Washington, DC in autumn 2019 an at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, in spring 2020.

 

‘Informed by critical race theory and feminisms, this is political curating at its best.’ – Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Fray: Art and Textile Politics

‘With considerable emotional awareness, Fast Fashion / Slow Art shines new lights into the dark realities of dress.’ – Otto von Busch, Associate Professor of Integrated Design, Parsons School of Design

Bibiana Obler is Associate Professor of Art History at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, George Washington University. Phyllis Rosenzweig is Curator Emerita, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. With essays by Kirsty Robertson and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu.