Piecing and Pasting and Other Materials Related to Jane Austen

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, Baltimore artist Lauren Frances Adams and historian Dr. Victoria Rose Pass share their collaborative exhibit as Library Artists-in-Residence in the Goucher College Library’s Jane Austen Collection.

The collection, largely assembled and donated by alumna Alberta Burke ’28, includes materials related to Jane Austen based on immersion, translation, adaptation, and iteration of Jane Austen’s novels and time period. The exhibit explores themes that scholars, adaptors, and readers alike have brought to Austen in recent years, such as labor, colonialism, and queer identity and includes themes that Burke identified in her own collecting: landscape, fashion, and women’s handcrafts. Adams and Pass combine the themes with the methodologies of scrapbooking, needlework, and quilting, which have historically been marginalized as unserious women’s work, and they use them as a way of thinking through what is meaningful to us about Austen’s work and Burke’s collection.

Lauren Frances Adams is an artist who explores power structures through paintings that incorporate historical decorative motifs. Victoria Rose Pass is a scholar whose work examines the intersection of race and gender in fashion history in the twentieth century. They are both faculty members at The Maryland Institute College of Art.