Meet the Curator Who’s Bringing Fashion Into the Fold at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Trends come and go. But the art behind fashion is very much in vogue for art museums today.

Around the globe and here in Cleveland, major institutions are embracing the art form. The Louvre in Paris curated its first fashion exhibition in its two centuries of operations last year. In 2017, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art showcased a fashion-focused exhibition for the first time in 73 years. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2018 show Heavenly Bodies experienced record-breaking attendance with more than 1.6 million visitors.

For the past few years, fashion has also been making its mark on the Cleveland Museum of Art’s offerings, perhaps nowhere as dramatically as in its current Renaissance to Runway show. And you have Darnell-Jamal Lisby, the CMA’s first fashion curator, to thank for it.

On view through Feb. 1, the exhibition connects Renaissance artworks from the CMA's collection with modern garments crafted by major Italian brands, including Armani, Versace, Capucci and more. Some items, specially crafted for celebrities like Blake Lively, Zendaya and Judy Garland, will be recognizable from their red carpet appearances.

“Oftentimes with fashion exhibitions, especially as of late, contemporary fashion exhibitions tend to resonate with the public more than historical fashion exhibitions,” Lisby says. “Anything pre-1950 is going to be a very complicated way to make that very relevant for many audiences.”

Since he was hired in 2021, Lisby has explored various facets of the medium through his work on museum exhibitions like Renaissance to Runway, The New Black Vanguard, Egyptomania and Korean Couture.

“Developing a department out of scratch is a very high bar,” Lisby says. “I think what's been interesting is the fact that we've been able to develop at a more rapid pace than, probably, what other institutions have been able to do at all.”

Before his work in Cleveland, Lisby worked as a fashion historian and education coordinator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and at various New York City spaces like the Costume Institute of the Met and the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The Atlanta native grew up in the museum-filled Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, where he discovered an interest in curatorial work. Then, he was drawn to fashion curation, specifically. He studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

“I was very much intrigued by the role of a curator in the way that they are able to research and then contextualize art for various audiences of different educational, economic and cultural backgrounds,” Lisby says.

Fashion, and its connections to the body, were of interest to the curator, who often examines intersections of Blackness and the history of fashion in his work.

Unlike other mediums, fashion exhibitions have their own challenges. Mannequins must be fit to the clothing items, and look natural within them; Lisby works with acclaimed textile expert Tae Smith to source and size mannequins for his projects.

Even though many of the pieces in Renaissance to Runway and Lisby’s past exhibitions were once handled and worn, the curator says it would be “diabolical” to put the garments on humans today.

“Clothes will deteriorate and degrade when you continue to touch them over and over again,” he says. “That’s why they don’t come out as often and aren’t seen as often on a regular basis.”

For that reason, Lisby incorporated a video created with generative artificial intelligence in order to see the exhibition’s pieces in motion, as first reported by cleveland.com. The video itself was crafted by designer Francesco Carrozzini, the son of former Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani, and digital AI artist Henry Hargreaves.

This is the first component of Renaissance to Runway that visitors will see — a playful, colorful and, at-times, psychedelic video, projected on a wall before entering the exhibit. The video realistically meshes together characters throughout time, wearing and moving in the garments in the show.

“From a conservation point of view, we will not be able to ever show those clothes in motion. They’re archives, or they’re a museum collection,” Lisby says. “How do you show this art form in motion, this creative form in motion, without putting it on people? (Carrozzini) came up with the idea of doing this artificial intelligence approach, and I thought it was really brilliant.”

Lisby points out other instances where the CMA uses AI, such as in its acclaimed, interactive ArtLens gallery.

“We’ve been working with artificial intelligence for years; it’s a part of the CMA DNA,” Lisby says. “This felt very natural. We don't really do tech for tech sake. We really just wanted to bring the clothes to life.”

While Renaissance to Runway wraps up its run in early February, you can expect fashion to stay in the museum’s future offerings, thanks to Lisby’s work establishing the department.

“I’m kind of taking a beat,” Lisby says. “I am a one-man army. But we are talking about the future. It is in motion. Everybody will just have to wait and see.”

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