Past Exhibitions

Intimately explore how embellishment contributed to 20th century design, fashion, and culture

The gallery will be closed from Friday March 29th to May 9th for rennovations. 

The gallery will reopen Friday, May 10th with our latest exhibition Making an Entrance: Magnifying the Details of 20th Century Dress  - 

UPCYCLED: A Fashion & Textile Exhibition of Remaking and Reinventing celebrates the creative of work of high school aged artists, designers, and makers. Young artists explored the medium of textiles by taking two-dimensional materials and making three-dimensional forms. Textiles offer innate textures, patterns, movement, colors, pattern, and variety which offer artists and designers a unique “canvas” to work with. ​ 

The Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design invites high school students to showcase their textile art and fashion designs! Students can submit textile art including apparel design, fiber art, and surface design work. This exhibition seeks to promote and celebrate the creative work of young artists, designers, and makers working with textile or fiber materials or techniques.

Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design students explore “enlarging the ordinary” through the creation of wearable art made from chipboard. Students used sketching, 3D modeling, and body scans to create these large scale three-dimensional fashion oriented objects.

Join us for a conversation and reception with artist Adria Renee about her work, inspiration, and collection at the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery on October 11th from 5:30-7:00pm.

Exploring the Intersections of Fashion and Fandom through Star Wars

FUTURE TENSE 2023 will celebrate the creative work of student artists, designers, and makers working with or inspired by fiber or textile materials or techniques. FUTURE TENSE 2023 offers a glimpse into the future of contemporary fibers by presenting the very best work being made by students in the field today. 

Textile, Merchandising, and Fashion Design students explored physical and metaphorical “human connections” through the creation of wearable art made from chipboard. Sketching and 3D modeling were used to conceptualize ideas. Students then learned to use Blender, a 3D modeling software, in conjunction with moveable 3D scans of themselves to visualize their ideas in real space. Blender also allowed for exploration of organic and geometric shapes in relation to flat patterns for project construction.

THIS WOMAN’S WORK:
FOUR COLLECTIONS BY KENDRA BENSON
This Woman's Work is a fashion project by Kendra Benson. Since 2013 she has produced four
collections - Japonica, Padam Padam, americanodyssey, and Nashua. Whether inspired by
dreams of 1940’s Paris, an obsession with a little-known chain of defunct roadside restaurants,
or a fascination with the dark side of American life, the collections are always heavily
researched and deeply rooted in nostalgia. Unexpected combinations of color and materials