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Gilding Northeast Ohio: Fashion and Fortune 1870–1900

Start Date 08 June 2024
End Date 13 October 2025
Venue Massillon Museum
Location Ohio, USA
Curator Brian Centrone

 

Gilding Northeast Ohio is a unique exhibition highlighting what made Ohio sparkle so bright in the Gilded Age. This project showcases fashion from the permanent collections of the Massillon Museum and the Western Reserve Historical Society and loans from various regional museums.  The garments and objects in the show tell the story of politicians, titans of industry, socialites, and the workers who helped gild Ohio. The Massillon Museum Main Gallery has been dramatically transformed to create an immersive experience.

Exciting exhibition features will include original costumes designed for the HBO series The Gilded Age.

The exhibition is guest-curated by Brian Centrone, who has long partnered with the Massillon Museum.  Centrone is a fashion historian specializing in late nineteenth-century British and American menswear, twentieth-century American menswear, queer fashion, pop culture fashion, and Barbie and Ken fashion and history.  He co-curated the exhibition Gray Area: Authenticity, Value, and Subversion in Fashion at the 80 WSE Gallery, New York (2018) and guest curated the exhibition The Cunning Wrinkle of Newness: 19th Century Origins, Implications, and Adoptions of the Trouser Crease at the Harold L. Drimmer Library in Valhalla, New York (2022).

Traveling from out of town? Guests staying at Massillon’s Hampton Inn during the exhibition receive a special rate by mentioning the word “Gilding” at the time of booking.  Visit https://www.hilton.com/en/hotels/mslohhx-hampton-massillon/ for more information!

Braille booklets of all exhibition text are available inside the gallery, courtesy of Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Funded in large part by a Major Arts Enhancements and Exhibitions Grant facilitated by ArtsinStark and Visit Canton, the project includes collaboration between dozens of regional partners to highlight the time period on which the exhibition focuses. Throughout the summer and into fall, programming in the form of concerts, performances, lectures, themed dinners, complementary exhibitions, and more will occur.  A complete list of events will be published soon.  The opening reception will take place on the afternoon of Sunday, June 9, and is free and open to the public.