Museum Studies Exhibition Space at the Park Central Branch Library
The Museum Studies Exhibition Space is a component of Missouri State's Department of Art and Design and operated by the faculty and students of the Art History & Visual Culture and Museum Studies programs.
The mission of the Museum Studies Exhibition Space is to provide exhibitions of art and artifacts from local museums and collections with interpretative labels and didactic display texts that have been researched and written by students and faculty of the Art History & Visual Culture and Museum Studies areas. As a service to the community, Museum Studies Exhibits are a public showcase for undergraduate scholarship and provide museum studies students with professional experience in curation and exhibition design.
The Museum Studies Exhibition Space is made possible by a 2024 Missouri Humanities Council Major Grant project directed by Dr. Billie Follensbee, which funded the purchase of the display cases for this exhibit space. The display cases have been placed on long-term loan with the Park Central Branch Library, in collaboration with the Department of Art and Design, Missouri State University.
EXHIBITION PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Summer - Fall 2026
Andean Textiles
June 26 - October 2, 2026
Closing reception on October 2, 2026, First Friday Art Walk
The Andean cultures extend down the western side of South America, from southern Ecuador through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, with ancient peoples cultivating cotton in the coastal deserts and highland communities herding llamas and alpacas in the Andes Mountains. This access to excellent sources of fiber enabled the skilled ancient Andean weavers to develop finely woven cloth of unsurpassed complexity and innovation.
Featured in this exhibition are Andean textiles from a variety of cultures and time periods, from a 19th-century Aymara coca bag, to 20th-century Otavalo Mestizo hand-woven pillowcases, to scraps of 1000-year-old Chancay fabrics that local people fashioned into dolls and sold to tourists in the 1960s.
These textiles were researched by McKenna O’Connor, Madison Ashworth, and Abby Wade, with additional contributions by Alisha Heitz, Vinita Williams, and Alyssa Cartier, all Missouri State University students and alumni of the ART487 Art of the Americas course or MST488 Basic Conservation of Art and Artifacts course taught by Prof. Billie Follensbee. The textiles were generously loaned for study, research, and exhibition from the MSU Department of Art and Design collections and from private collections in the Ozarks region.
The exhibitions on research and conservation in the Museum Studies Exhibition Space, Park Central Branch Library, are researched by advanced students in the Museum Studies program and the Art History & Visual Culture program at Missouri State. The exhibitions are curated by Dr. Billie Follensbee, Area Program Coordinator, Art & Design Department, MSU.
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