In 1985 I presented myself to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a volunteer…perusing my resume [mostly theatrical productions I designed or built costumes or scenery for], they suggested The Costume Institute, a curatorial department [that was once a museum called the Museum of Costume Art, founded in 1937, but that is another story].
Around Labor Day, I started volunteering there, in “Study Storage,” doing everything from dusting floors and cupboards [day one] to filing cards, to sewing in accession labels…but autumn was “all hands on deck” for taking one exhibition down and installing another, so I assisted with the dismantling of "Man and the Horse" and went on the enthralling ride of learning how to dress and style mannequins for "Costumes of Royal India!"
By December, the Costume Institute decided to actually pay me to stick around, and so I did…for 15 years. It was the best place in the universe to grow up in. I am still enjoying and adding to all I learned there.
Suffice it say, working at the Met is the gold standard in so many ways. It made me a museum lover and worker and lifer. The Met continues to evolve at a pace that mystifies most other institutions...on the most remarkable armature are added...D.J. Spooky as Artist in Residence? That concert tonight in Dendur celebrating an app? I know about it from Twitter.
It has been great to be able to step out of that fortress and mix with one of its young colleagues [ICP used to be 12 blocks up the street]. ICP's Cornell Capa got a great boost in the 1970s from gracious, generous Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was a lender, as I recall, to the second exhibition I worked on at The Costume Institute - Dance!
In the Diana Vreeland years I experienced, Katell le Bourhis was her "boots on the ground" [I have to use that term, thinking of red snakeskin Roger Vivier as the boots in question] overseer and micro-manager. It was an incredible time!
The Costume Institute exhibitions I worked on over those years:
Costumes of Royal India
Dance!
In Style: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Costume Institute
Costume of Asian Peoples
From Queen to Empress: Victorian Dress, 1837-1877
Apropos Aprons
The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire
Small Illusions: Children's Costume, 1710-1920
Theatre de la Mode
Fashion and History: A Dialogue
Infra-Apparel
Versailles 1973: American Fashion on the World Stage
DV: Immoderate Style
Waist Not
Madame Gres
Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress
Bloom: Fashion's Spring Gardens
Swords into Ploughshares
Haute Couture
Bare Witness
Two by Two
Christian Dior
The Four Seasons
Wordrobe
Gianni Versace
Cubism and Fashion
Ceaseless Century
American Ingenuity
Our New Clothes
Costume and Character in the Age of Ingres
Rock Style
What did I do? Whatever I was instructed/told to [See another section about my ease with the word “yes.”]. What did that include?
Dressed and styled mannequins, built petticoats, collars and cuffs, corsets, styled mannequin hair out of every material known, wrote and edited labels, proofread same, wall painting, elephant painting, mannequin painting, dusting, spraying perfume in the galleries [I kid you not], checking loans in and out, reconstructing DV’s Vogue bulletin Board, lots and lots and lots and lots of research, and gradually, after becoming the librarian in 1995, I was the curator/installer of the publication/paper parts of the exhibitions under the thoughtful support and mentorship of the curator who made me a librarian, Richard H. Martin, and the delightful curator and landscape architect of mannequins Harold Koda.