Join us for a conversation exploring the nuances of cultural appropriation and appreciation in fashion. This talk takes place on the opening day of Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style. 

This panel will feature Abram Jackson, director of interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and exhibition catalogue contributors Susan B. Kaiser, professor emerita, UC Davis, departments of design, and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, and editor of Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, visiting faculty member at the California College of the Arts and PhD candidate in the department of art and art history at Stanford University, and Lewis Watts, photographer and professor emeritus UC Santa Cruz. Laura Camerlengo, exhibition curator and curator in charge of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will moderate the panel.

• Abram Jackson (FAMSF, director of interpretation)
• Laura Camerlengo (FAMSF, curator in charge of costume and textile arts)
• Susan B. Kaiser (UC Davis, professor emerita, departments of design, and gender, sexuality, women’s studies, and editor of Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty)
• Ann Marguerite Tartsinis (California College of the Arts and Stanford University)
• Lewis Watts (Emeritus UC Santa Cruz)

Watch the livestream

About the speakers

Abram Jackson joined the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as the Museums’ inaugural director of interpretation in June 2022. Jackson utilizes ethnic studies theories and DEIA practices in partnership with staff to incorporate more inclusive narratives into didactics. One of Jackson’s contributions to this effort is the interpretation partners program, which incorporates local voices into the interpretive framing for special exhibitions with themes connected to lived experiences of local and global communities. Jackson holds a master of arts in ethnic studies from San Francisco State University and a master of teaching in social studies from the University of Southern California. Jackson has 15 years of administrative and teaching experience at the high school and collegiate level and has taught at education programs for incarcerated people in California. 

Laura L. Camerlengo is curator in charge of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curator of the exhibition Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style. Since 2010, Camerlengo has organized, co-organized, and presented numerous costume and textiles exhibitions for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a focus on sharing the stories of women and artists of color. Her publications include The Miser’s Purse (2013), Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love (co-authored by Dilys E. Blum, 2021), and Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style (2024), as well as contributions to West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America, and Objective: Journal of the History of Design and Curatorial Studies. She holds a master of arts degree in the history of decorative arts and design from Parsons, the New School for Design/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

Ann Marguerite Tartsinis is a visiting faculty member at the California College of the Arts and a PhD candidate in the department of art and art history at Stanford University. From 2010 to 2016, she was an associate curator at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, where she organized several fashion history and material culture exhibitions. Her publications include An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928 (2013) and Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art (co-authored with Nancy J. Troy, 2023), as well as contributions to Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture, The Journal of Modern Craft, and The Winterthur Portfolio, among numerous other journals and exhibition catalogues. Tartsinis’s current research concerns include the relationship between fashion and ethnographic photography during the interwar period and the work of Japanese-American weaver Alice Kagawa Parrott.

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator, and professor emeritus of art at UC Santa Cruz. His artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in the African Diaspora. He is the co-author with Elizabeth Pepin of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (Heyday Books Berkeley, 2020) as well as New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition (UC Press, 2013) and Portraits (Edition One Press Berkeley, 2020). His work has been exhibited at and/or is in the collections of the Zimmerli Museum, Staatiche Kunstammiunger, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art: University of Oregon, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Citè de La Musique, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Neuberger Museum of Art, Amistad Center for Art and Culture, and Light Work, among others.

Susan B. Kaiser is professor emerita at UC Davis, having served in the departments of textiles and clothing; design; and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. She was a founding member of the cultural studies PhD program and served as the interim dean of humanities, arts, and cultural studies from 2015 to 2018. Her research centers on the interplay between fashion studies and intersectional, feminist cultural studies, with a current interest in rethinking time and place through fashion. She is the author of The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context (Fairchild 1997) and Fashion and Cultural Studies (Bloomsbury 2012; revised with Denise Green in 2021), and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters in the fields of textiles, clothing, and fashion studies; cultural studies; consumer cultures; sociology; and related fields. She is currently an editor of the journal Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty.

Ticket info

Free. Seating is limited and unassigned. Tickets for the discussion are distributed on a first-come first-served basis in front of the Koret Auditorium an hour before the program begins. This does not include admission to the museum. 

Contact info

Public Programs
publicprograms@famsf.org
415.750.7694