Exhibition: Nurturing the Artist: Student Life From the FIT Special Collections — Opens

November 1–December 1, 2025
Art and Design Gallery, Back Gallery

FIT’s Special Collections and College Archives, part of the Gladys Marcus Library, is known for its fashion documentation through rare periodicals, fashion plates, monographs detailing all aspects of the industry, and unique manuscript collections. These materials provide entrance into often unpublished behind-the-scenes processes critical to fashion design, marketing, forecasting, and research.

The College Archives, a lesser-known part of the Special Collections, documents the history of the college, our evolving programs, and the student body over eight decades. At this momentous time, on the cusp of ushering in new leadership when longstanding President Joyce F. Brown retires, we delved into the College Archives to explore documentary evidence of how students, their work, and campus life in general has been recorded since the college’s inception in 1944.

Moving forward, the Special Collections of FIT is actively working to expand its holdings to include more contemporary and diverse designers and makers operating in a variety of fields, as well as aiming to capture a broader geographic scope of work across fashion, design, and art.

Two newly acquired, as yet unprocessed, collections included in this exhibition—the Douglas Says Collection and the Steven Cutting Collection—are examples of this expanded vision.

Nurturing the Artist is curated by FIT’s Special Collections and College Archives, part of the Gladys Marcus Library.

This exhibition is free and open to the public.