Winter 2018: Morgan Snoap

Winter 2019 Travel/Research Experience: Washington DC & New York City

            Last winter, I was able to take a trip to Washington DC and New York City to begin preliminary research for my senior honors thesis and to visit art institutions in the cities. Before heading to DC, I contacted the George Washington University Textile Museum to set up an appointment to view several textiles from their North African collection which provided early context and direction for my thesis research. On December 20^th, I went to the Textile Museum’s off-site research and collections center where I met with the registrar Kathleen King and viewed my seven selected textiles. At the end of this viewing time, I was also able to go on a quick tour of the museum’s textile storage area where Kathleen showed me the various storage methods for the textiles. Also during my time in DC, I was met with Dr. Sumru Krody, the chief curator of the Textile Museum, to ask her questions about her job, as well as about textile art history and curation more broadly. In addition to these textile-focused experiences, I also visited several museums to enrich my overall arts education. In DC, I visited the National Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, the Hirshhorn, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In fact, at the National Gallery is where I first encountered Renoir’s Femme d’Algerand noticed the subject’s North African costuming, which served as the inspiration for my current thesis research on Algerian women’s dress and its representation in early French colonial documents. In NY, I visited the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim.