Curator's profile

Dr Jacqueline Marx Atkins, Chief Curator for the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania until she retired in 2011, is a textile historian and consulting curator for the Itchiku Kubota Kimono Collection.
She has written and lectured extensively on Japanese early modern textiles and garments, as well as Japanese and American quilt history.
Her publications, among others, include The Textile Artistry of Itchiku Kubota: Kimono From the Kubota Collection; As We Are Now, So Shall You One Day Be: Skeleton Motifs in Japanese Kimono; “Wearing Novelty” in The Brittle Decade: Visualizing Japan in the 1930s; and Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931–1945.
She has recently been guest curator for the Textile Museum of Toronto, Canada and the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute in Utica, New York for exhibitions featuring kimono from the Itchiku Kubota Collection as well as curator for exhibitions at museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, Bard Graduate Center in New York, the Honolulu Art Museum in Hawaii, Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and elsewhere.
She also has curated collections of early modern and wartime kimono for several international collectors.
Dr Atkins holds a Ph.D. from the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, and MA and BS degrees from Columbia University.
She was also a recipient of a Fulbright Research Award to Japan, which led to her interest in Japan’s early modern textiles.
Selected publications
Images of Culture: Japanese Kimono 1915-1950 in the Nasser D. Khahili Collection (scheduled for 2020)
New York Beauties: Quilts of the Empire State
Shared Threads: Quilting Together Past and Present
Folk Art in American Life
Tradition and Transformation: Women Quilt Designers
Wearing Propaganda: Civilian Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, America, and Great Britain, 1931-1945
Quilting Transformed: A History of Contemporary Quilting in America
Wearing Novelty
The Textile Artistry of Itchiku Kubota: Kimono from the Kubota Collection
As We Are Now So Shall You One Day Be: Skeleton Motifs in Japanese Kimono