Fashion professor's exhibition on Isabelle de Borchgrave at the Frick

Dennita Sewell, curator of fashion design at Phoenix Art Museum and professor of practice in the School of Art’s fashion program in Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, organized an exhibition on the work of Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave that is currently showing at Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh. 

The exhibition, “Isabelle de Borchgrave: Fashioning Art from Paper," has been traveling the country since it opened in October 2017 at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, and “is a mid-career examination of one of the most creative figures working in Europe today.” Painter and contemporary artist de Borchgrave uses paper to recreate historic fashions.

“This exhibition celebrates de Borchgrave’s most iconic bodies of work, including ‘Les Ballets Russes’, ‘Papiers à la Mode,’ ‘The World of Mariano Fortuny,’ ‘The Kaftans’ and ‘Splendor of the Medici,’ all of which illuminate 500 years of fashion history,” according to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens website.

The exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalog written by Sewell, has traveled to four venues in the United States, with the next stop slated for Artis-Naples, the Baker Museum in Florida. 

Sewell and de Borchgrave participated in a conversation about the featured artist’s artistic journey at the Dixon opening lecture and will also speak at some of the other exhibition venues.

The exhibition is organized by Dixon Gallery and Gardens, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Society of the Four Arts, Frick Art and Historical Center and Artis-Naples, the Baker Museum.