Between One and Many: Textiles of Place & Memory - Tabards of Place Threaded Paths x MGSA Theater @ 50
Tabards of Place reinterprets the 15th-century tabard, a garment historically linked to identity, allegiance, and alliance, as a contemporary framework for narrative and material investigation. Drawing from her sabbatical research project, Garments of Devotion and Valor: Textiles and the Tabard, and informed by fieldwork in Turkey, Croatia, and Italy, artist, designer, and scholar Valerie Marcus Ramshur creates custom digital photographic textiles shaped by the landscapes, architectures, and material cultures of Byzantine, Venetian, Ragusan, and Ottoman sites. Each tabard functions as an abstracted cartographic study, translating geographic, architectural, and chromatic research into textured, wearable form. The work investigates how garments can serve as repositories of place, devotion, and cultural memory, inviting the body to carry story, history, and identity across time, to hold what we have witnessed, and shape it in cloth.
Threaded Paths × MGSA Theater @ 50, founded and curated by Ramshur, brings together nearly 100 ten-inch stitched squares created by makers within the Mason Gross School of the Arts Theater community and from around the world. Premiering during New York Textile Month at the 3rd Ethos Gallery in Brooklyn, the project has been recognized for its international reach and depth of personal storytelling. Each square holds a narrative of identity, memory, transformation, or place. Displayed collectively, these works form a growing textile archive of stitched stories, experiences, and creative histories.
Together, Tabards of Place and Threaded Paths create a dialogue between individual and collective textile expression, revealing how cloth operates simultaneously as personal artifact and cultural document, mapping the ways we remember, imagine, and locate ourselves in the world.
The exhibition will be held in the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Douglass Library. Gallery Hours: Monday-Thursday 9:00am-7:00pm; Friday 9:00am-6:00pm. Hours subject to libraries' operating schedule.
Valerie Marcus Ramshur is a nationally recognized costume designer, historian, and faculty member in the Theater Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts. As Head of Costume Design and Director of Design and Production, she examines the intersection of art, dress, and identity across performance and material culture, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and discourse. Her research and curatorial practice reflect a deep commitment to dress history and community archivism, weaving together scholarship, creative practice, and public engagement.
Location: Douglass Library, New Brunswick