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Conference: Cloth Cultures: Legacies of Dorothy K. Burnham

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) hosted this international conference to explore clothing and textiles through the work and legacy of Dorothy K. Burnham (1911–2004), internationally renowned textile scholar.1 Burnham was in the vanguard of curators who sought to make costume and textiles a valid field of scholarship. Burnham was the first curator of textiles at the ROM, appointed in 1939 (figure 1). Today, the ROM’s textiles and fashions collection is the largest in Canada, consisting of over 55,000 pieces, and is considered to be among the top three collections in the world.2 The collection is wide-ranging, spanning different geographies, time periods, and cultures. The Cloth Cultures: Legacies of Dorothy K. Burnham conference topics and scholars reflected this broad scope, and the threads of Burnham’s work, in both her Canadian and global contexts, were woven through the presentations and conversations. Sessions included Methodologies I and II, Indigenous Communities, Maker Communities, Identity of Communities, Makers and Making, Documenting Quilting Knowledge, Other Quilting Cultures, and Learning from the Loom. In this review, detailing all of the papers given due to the wide array of topics covered is not possible. The focus here is Burnham’s contributions to the study of garments and her specifically Canadian context. The many hats Burnham wore—draftswoman, graphic artist, museum curator, weaving practitioner, traveler, writer, ethnographer, collector, teacher, activist, pioneer—also were reflected in the gathering of academics, artists, and maker communities in attendance. Hosting the conference at the institution where Burnham worked provided a special setting, especially for the two workshops: “Keep Me Warm: Hand-woven Canadian Textiles” and “Cut My Cote: Dorothy K. Burnham’s Collecting and Research Methodologies,” presented by textile experts Adrienne Hood and John Vollmer, respectively (figure 2). These workshops allowed participants to discuss Burnham’s collecting, research methodologies, and interpretive practice, while getting a closer look at artifacts from the collection with which she worked. The opening lecture, “Fashioning Things with Burnham: An Exploration” given by Timo Rissanen, also served as the ROM’s 2017 Veronika Gervers Lecture.3 Rissanen, Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Sustainability, Parsons School of Design, spoke of his joy in discovering a like-minded thinker in Dorothy K. Burnham when he first opened the pages of 1 https://www.rom.on.ca/en/collections-research/research-community-projects/textiles-fashions/ cloth-cultures [accessed January 3, 2018].