Past Exhibitions

Gary Graham is an artist who approaches fashion design as a material culture of elegance and decay. Upon graduating with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he began working for artist and designer J. Morgan Puett, learning the craft of garment dyeing and less formal approaches to textiles and historical interpretation. In 1999 he designed his first collection and in 2009 Graham was honored as a CFDA/Vogue finalist. Working with museums ranging from The Peabody Essex Museum to The American Folk Art Museum and RISD Museum, Graham mines museological archives for inspiration in installations and performances that explore history as a living experience. In 2021 Graham was selected to be a contestant on the second season of Amazon Prime's "Making the Cut". A history-loving designer storyteller, Gary Graham is inspired by material culture that blend fictional characters with historical narratives. Blurring distinctions between past, present and future, his work offers a creative approach to the tactile and sensual attributes of textiles and the drama of contemporary historical interpretation.

The year 2020 marked the 60th anniversary of Hancock Shaker Village as a museum. Notes About Home is a poignant look back, connecting past to present as we envision the future. The exhibit is a dynamic collage of photographs, newspaper articles, posters, blueprints, oral histories, and videos.