Kate Irvin

Curator and Head, Costume & Textiles
BA, Brown University

Kate Irvin is curator and head of the Costume and Textiles department at the RISD Museum. There she oversees a collection of 30,000 fashion and textile items that range in date from 1500 BCE to the present and represent traditions and innovations across the globe.

Irvin’s most recent exhibition was Repair and Design Futures (October 2018–June 2019), a multidisciplinary, yearlong exhibition and academic programming initiative that investigated mending as material intervention, metaphor and call to action by showcasing practices of repair from around the globe together with programming highlighting innovative art and design projects.

Other recent exhibitions and projects at the museum include From the Loom of a Goddess: Reverberations of Guatemalan Maya Weaving (2018), Designing Traditions: Student Explorations in the Asian Textile Collections (2017), All of Everything: Todd Oldham Fashion (2016) and Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion (2013).

Spring 2023

  • LAEL-1082-01 History Of Western Textiles: Many Hands, Many Voices: Textile Histories and Entanglements In The Americas
BA, Brown University