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.