With his talent for design and promotion, Charles Frederick Worth built his design house into a huge business during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Although most of MacMonnies’ works were conceived to be cast in bronze, the artist employed various media to achieve his creative goals.

The delicate texture of [Kensett’s] brushwork was concentrated to produce pure and exquisite states of light and atmosphere, today referred to as luminist.

Never having had formal dressmaking training, [Charles James] developed his own methodology based on mathematical, architectural, and sculptural concepts as they relate to the human body.

Assistant for Archival Processing Caitlin McCarthy introduces the recently acquired Charles James Papers.

Editorial Assistant Rachel High discusses the elaborate process of photographing Charles James's works with photographer Karin Willis.

This incisive publication explores the formal, conceptual, political, and technical aspects of the work of contemporary American artist Charles Ray. For Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Spanning the whole of his fifty-year career, Charles Ray: Figure Ground considers the artist's intriguing, often unsettling sculptures from both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to his early photographs and performances. It also explores his interest in Mark Twain's 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Kelly Baum addresses patterns and patterning in Ray's art, foregrounding his engagement with preexisting traditions, classicism among them, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality. Brinda Kumar investigates the modalities of touch that run through Ray's work, while a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice.

Editorial Assistant Rachel High discusses the process of conserving Charles James's works with Costume Institute Conservators Sarah Scaturro and Glenn Petersen.

Editorial Assistant Rachel High discusses the exhibition catalogue Charles James: Beyond Fashion with co-author Jan Glier Reeder.

The spring 2010 exhibition organized by The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, the first drawn from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Met. The exhibition, on view from May 5 through August 15, 2010, explores developing perceptions of the modern American woman from the 1890s to the 1940s, and how they have affected the way American women are seen today. Focusing on archetypes of American femininity through dress, the exhibition reveals how the American woman initiated style revolutions that mirrored her social, political, and sartorial emancipation. Early mass-media representations of American women established the fundamental characteristics of American style – a theme explored via a multimedia installation in the final gallery.