The Art of Archiving the Artifact

Course Description

Summary

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Fall ‘26

Working in collaboration with the local Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion, students will create a new archive of the historic dress collection.

Archiving historical garments plays a vital role in preserving human history, allowing for research, understanding cultural shifts, and highlighting the social and economic contexts of the past. Archives serve as repositories for tangible pieces of history, enabling researchers to study clothing styles, materials, and construction techniques across different eras and cultures.  And in this collection the historic clothing provides a grounding in the lives of women who came before us. The collection represents a wealthy upper class family and the social milieus that that entails, but is a window into the handiwork and mending of working people, along with the refined craftsmanship of the couturiers of Paris and their New York counterparts. These 19th century garments represent hours of hand work and detail the shift from human to assisted mechanization to fully automated fabrication.  

Through researching and documenting the history of individual artifacts, students will explore the changing silhouette of the 19th century and the questions it poses about femininity and gender, learn the basics for cataloging, and explore the conversation of preservation vs restoration.

Some classes will take place off campus at the Park-McCullough Mansion which is a 20-30 min walk from campus or drivable with parking.