Between One and Many: Textiles of Place & Memory Exhibition | Tabards of Place + Threaded Paths × MGSA Theater @ 50
Between One and Many: Textiles of Place & Memory
Tabards of Place + Threaded Paths × MGSA Theater @ 50
March 23 - April 9, 2026
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.
This dual exhibition explores how textiles function as carriers of story, markers of place, and vessels of identity across time and culture. Co-sponsored by the Center for Women in the Arts at Douglass.
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 MGSA Theatre 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.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Valerie Marcus Ramshur is a nationally recognized costume designer, historian, and professor at Rutgers University, where she teaches in the Department of Theatre at the 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.