Richard Martin (curator)
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Richard Martin (1947 – 1999) was an American scholar, lecturer, critic and curator, and a leading art and fashion historian. At the time of his death he was curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, creating many critically acclaimed exhibitions and contributing widely towards publications on the subject. After his death, an award in his name was set up to recognise creative, high quality and innovative costume exhibitions.
Richard Harrison Martin was born December 4, 1946, at Bryn Mawr, PA. He studied at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1967, and gained two master's degrees, both from Columbia University.[1] As a lecturer, he held academic positions at the School of Visual Arts, New York University, Columbia, the Juilliard School and Parsons School of Design.[1] and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Curatorship
Richard Martin taught art history from 1973 at New York University, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and the School of Visual Arts. In 1980 he became involved with fashion exhibitions at FIT where he worked with Harold Koda and Laura Sinderbrand, the director of FIT's Design Laboratory (now the Museum at FIT).[1] He served as the editor in chief of Arts Magazine before his 1991 appointment as executive director of the Shirley Goodman Resource Center, which was responsible for FIT's exhibitions and collections.[1]
The exhibitions Martin and Koda put up at FIT, including The East Village, Fashion and Surrealism, Undercover Story, and Three Women: Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, Rei Kawakubo attracted a great deal of attention.[1] In 1987 they were given a special award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Martin would later win another award from the Council in 1996 "for furthering fashion in art and culture."[1] Koda, who worked closely with Martin on exhibitions until they parted company in 1997, later said:
- "We did five or six shows a year at F.I.T. and three a year at the Met, while most museums do only one. And he always had three or four years' worth of ideas. Some fashion people had difficulty with his language, because his language was the language of art, not fashion."[1]
Martin wrote over 100 scholarly papers on a wide range of subjects, such as Art History and the Assimilation of Images by Contemporary Artists, and Redress of the Nerds: The Assertion of Nerd Style in Men's Clothing and Imagery in the 1980s. He also wrote a number of books on fashion and art, including Fashion and Surrealism and Charles James, and co-authored others. Martin was critical of the tendency within the art world to designate fashion into a corner of its own, and not acknowledging designers as artists, rather than merely being commercially driven. He states:
I think that’s an abiding problem for artists, that because fashion is so often thought to be less serious than art, artists are afraid that they will vitiate their own work and their own importance as artists by participating in any way in fashion. Artists will often shy away from fashion and yet when it comes to incorporating fashion into their own work—such as David Salle using sort of 1950s fashion sketches in his work—that’s perfectly acceptable.[2]
He was also editor of Dress, the Costume Society of America's scholarly journal.[3]
