Join us for BGC Late: Jazz & Conversation in the Gallery (the series formerly known as First Wednesdays)! Enjoy cool jazz, warm vibes, and a glass of wine; see our fascinating exhibitions and learn from provocative conversations about the objects on view. Gene Perla and the fantastic musicians he brings together start playing at 6 pm. At 7 pm, fashion scholars Waleria Dorogova, Rhonda Garelick, Mellissa Huber and Jan Glier Reeder lead a conversation about women designers, including Gabrielle Chanel, Jeanne Lanvin, Boué Sœurs and Jeanne Paquin.

Music Provided by:
Troy Roberts (Sax)
Rachel Z ( Piano)
Gene Perla (Bass)
Clarence Penn (Drums)

More BGC Late: Jazz & Conversation in the Gallery

Thursday, November 7
Jazz at 6 pm
Conversation at 7 pm
Fashion and Female Suffrage
Organized by Aelxis Romano of Fashion Research Network

Thursday, December 5
Jazz at 6 pm
Conversation at 7 pm
Fashion, War, Displacement, and Immigration
With Nancy Green

Waleria Dorogova is a historian and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bonn, where she studied Art History and Classical Archaeology. Now based in Vienna, she currently works at the interdisciplinary project Austrian Center for Fashion Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Prior to this she was curator of the Goldsmiths Textile Collection and worked for Kerry Taylor Auctions, as well as an independent researcher. Her research and publications center around early twentieth-century haute couture, Russian diaspora in Paris fashion and international relations in fashion. The subject of her dissertation is the history of the Franco-American fashion house Boué Sœurs (1897-1957).

Rhonda Garelick is the Dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons/The New School. She is the author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (Random House, 2014); Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2007); Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 1998); and co-editor of Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self (University of Nebraska Press, 2010). Her column, “Reading the Signs” appears regularly in The Cut (New York Magazine), and she her cultural criticism appears often in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Brooklyn Rail, and other venues. Rhonda has also held professorships at Connecticut College, CUNY Graduate Center, Princeton, and NYU/Gallatin. She is a Guggenheim fellow and has also received awards from the NEA, the NEH, the Getty Research Institute, the Dedalus Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Whiting Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature and French from Yale University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Mellissa Huber is assistant curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and specializes in twentieth-century fashion. Since joining the Museum in 2012, she has assisted the department with research and content development for numerous special exhibitions, including Punk: Chaos to Couture (2013); Charles James: Beyond Fashion (2014); Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire (2014); China: Through the Looking Glass (2015); Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style (2015); Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology (2016); Masterworks: Unpacking Fashion (2016); Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and The Catholic Imagination (2018); and the forthcoming In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection (2019). Mellissa graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology with a BFA and minor in art history. She holds a certificate in curating fashion from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and an MA in visual culture from New York University, where she is an adjunct professor in the Costume Studies graduate program.

Jan Glier Reeder is a fashion historian and consulting curator for the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Music for BGC Late: Jazz & Conversation in the Gallery is guest curated by musician Gene Perla. Perla was raised in New Jersey where he studied classical piano and trombone. After attending Berklee School of Music, he moved to New York and began his musical career as a jazz bassist. He has performed and/or recorded with Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman, Elvin Jones, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Chuck Mangione, Joni Mitchell, Buddy Rich, Sonny Rollins, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Stone Alliance, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, and others. In the early 1970s he formed music publishing and record companies, and his group “Stone Alliance” traveled to South America and Europe, through which he developed experience in management and booking. Perla is also a Broadway sound designer (Tony Award for City of Angels), has expertise in recording studio operations, and is the webmaster for the Jazz Education Network.