By Betsy DiJulio
This is the story of how the contemporary art trope of the “empty dress,” symbolizing both presence and absence, connected three high school juniors and an ODU professor through a shared passion for women’s social justice.
The students—Adaline Scott and Ella Stufflebeem with assistance from Olivia Kohler—are all Global Affairs Fellows (GAF) at Norfolk Academy. The GAF is one of five leadership cohorts within the Batten Leadership Program at the Academy which seeks to empower students to understand and contribute to solving complex problems. In the case of GAF, this includes a more peaceful and just world. The professor, Jennifer N. Fish, Ph.D., is a public sociologist and photographer who has taught women’s and gender studies, international studies, and visual storytelling for two decades. Both Dr. Fish and her students are widely published, and Fish is a highly sought-after lecturer and educator in the global sphere.
The Fellows and the professor’s pedagogical paths intersected at community-based research and global service learning. As conversation threads became intertwined, soon the concept for a dual exhibition, What She Wore, What She Bore: Threads of Strength & Struggle and The REDress Project, took shape in time for National Women’s History Month observed annually in March.
Note: the exhibition is free and only open to the public on March 22-23, 29-30, noon to 4 at the Perrel Gallery on the campus of Norfolk Academy (www.norfolkacademy.org).
All credit for The REDress Project concept goes to its originator, Jaime Black, an indigenous artist activist in Canada who conceived of these ongoing art installations in 2010 as an aesthetic response to the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW) and children in Canada and the US. The Fellows had learned about the epidemic while visiting a Crow reservation in Montana as part of their summer academic travel experience, and they returned to school committed to raising awareness. A summer 2024 Zoom call with Black resulted in her generous carte blanch—or carte rouge—to run with her concept.
At Norfolk Academy, the student co-curators and I collected red dresses in a beautiful range of tones and styles—symbolic of violence, but also lifeblood and kinship—which will be donated following the exhibition. The students designed their installation, creating an artful array of dresses both in the Academy’s Perrel Gallery and in two interior courtyards in the Upper School. Poignant for different reasons, the outdoor installations seem especially intimate and meditative as the dresses alternately hang solemn and still or flutter and sway in the occasional breeze.
Introduced by a mutual friend and colleague, Fish and I first met in the gallery where a conversation about her approach to visual storytelling sparked a number of possible directions through which to share her photography. But it was ultimately her local work with women’s labor and migration that became the focus of the Threads exhibition, specifically the unfolding story of a woman named Suzana.
Originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Suzana had migrated from a United Nations “camp” in Tanzania to Newport News with her four children, two pieces of luggage, and a folder of documents, leaving the rest of her family behind. In 2021, during the height of the pandemic, Suzana became one of the 1% of the world’s 44 million refugees to legally resettle in another country. Fish met her under the auspices of Commonwealth Catholic Charities—Hampton Roads’ resettlement agency—who asked if Fish would provide another layer of support to this newly-arrived family. The photographic narrative Fish has been constructing to tell a deeper story about their transition—full of isolation, community, joy, struggle, and resilience—forms the basis of Threads of Strength & Struggle with its centerpiece a stunning “empty dress” entitled Endurable Occasion.
Fish located a Mennonite printer to print her original photos of Suzana and her documents on fabric, what Fish refers to as “defining moments and objects in one woman’s journey of resettlement as a refugee”: portraits, a repeated fingerprint signature, and a resettlement map from the U.S. government. Co-designed with Shabani Lubula, a 26-year-old Congolese sewer, they fashioned a formal dress from this fabric to highlight “the importance of fashion as celebration in Congolese culture.”
Fish describes each section of the dress as “layered to reflect the culmination of experiences, histories, and achievements central to the life journey of relocation.” A formal train in the front is meant to reflect the “obstacles embedded in every aspect of resettlement,” while the hand-crafted flower adornments and accents “assure the endurable resilience of women at the symbolic center of this creation.” She continues: “The United Nations language of resettlement so often proposes “durable solutions”—a term adapted by many refugees as an aspirational hope for humanity. This creation is a tribute to survival and the profound meaning of celebration—even amidst extensive struggle. It symbolizes the depth of aesthetic appreciation alongside the journeys of endurance women around the world inhabit in their daily lives.”
Overall, the pair of exhibitions is intended to ask questions and encourage conversations about our responsibility to care for the marginalized and displaced, as well as the victims of violence, that we may better understand our own sense of place, belonging, support, and security or, as Fish writes, “the profound interconnectedness of human beings, far beyond imagined borders.”
Note: Betsy DiJulio is the curator of Perrel Gallery; both she and the publisher of VEER felt this show was timely and worthy of sharing in these pages. To avoid the appearance of impropriety, DiJulio was not financially compensated for this article.
Read more about Jennifer Fish and the scope and impact of her work here: https://www.odu.edu/directory/jennifer-fish and www.jennifernataliefish.com
