Threads of History: Textiles at Cornell is a series of exhibits that will be opening throughout 2022-2023 at Cornell University libraries and special collections. The inaugural exhibit in the series, Threads of Life, Love, and Loss: An HIV/AIDS Story will open Monday, August 15th at the Human Ecology Building.

Threads of Life, Love, & Loss: An HIV/AIDS Story explores how fashion, textiles, and archives can be activated in the struggle for health equity amidst an ongoing global health crisis that has lasted more than 40 years and robbed families, friends, and communities of upwards of 40 million lives. We focus on one story of many affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Mark Goldstaub (1951 – 1988), his partner Edmund Wojcik (1955 – 1995), and the many lives they touched, to show how cloth and creative expression have the transformative potential to raise awareness, record histories, memorialize, destigmatize, and make positive change in the world.

Curated by Professor Denise N. Green, Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design and Director of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (CF+TC), Michael Mamp of the Department of Textiles, Apparel Design and Merchandising at LSU, and Brenda Marston, Curator of Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection