The Third Space: Textiles in Material and Visual Culture explores textiles, paintings, and prints in the collections of the Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium. The exhibition evokes post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and a “Third Space” to rehistoricize the objects housed in these collections, and the collections themselves.
This provides a unique opportunity to read material and visual culture anew. What cultural, political, and economic contexts brought these particular objects to the Five College collections? What do these objects tell us about the history of institutional collections in Western Massachusetts? What effect does the medium of a digital exhibition have on tactile objects, such as textiles, and their interpretation?