Portland State Magazine, Spring 2021

the arts SO-MIN KANG UNCOMMON APPAREL A new program explores the intersection of costuming, sculpture and fashion IF YOU ASKED Alison Heryer if she is a costume designer, a sculptor or a textile artist, her answer would likely be “yes.” With a resume boasting dozens of costume design credits at many of the country’s most respected professional theater companies, Heryer has brought her multidisciplinary approach to Portland State’s School of Art + Design, where she heads the burgeoning Textile Arts program and was recently named the Sue Horn-Caskey and Charles F. Caskey Professor in Textile Arts and Costume Design. In this role, Heryer has built a program that ofers students the same creative versatility she has sought in her own career. 16 // PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE Launched in 2019, Textile Arts is an elective track for stu- dents pursuing a BFA in Art Practice who want to focus on textiles in any of their many forms, from sustainable fashion to soft sculpture. “Students learn skills such as construction weaving, surface design and pattern development, combined with context courses that cover the social history of textiles and dress,” says Heryer. In the BFA program, students are required to take half their credits in the form of elective courses, which they select according to their interests, with the goal of building a body of work for their portfolio. For instance, a student interested in textile design might also take printmaking and drawing courses to get experience with illustration and color theory and inform their thinking about patterns and motifs. “My philosophy centers around helping students fnd their own path,” she says. “What I love about the BFA program is that we encourage these kinds of intersections to happen.” “With costume, the body is the canvas, which lives on the larger canvas of the stage.” HERYER’S MOTHER and grandmother taught her to sew as a child growing up in Kansas City, Missouri.Tis sparked her interest in thrifting and fashioning new apparel out of old. “I’ve always been a kind of a magpie that way,” she says. Later, as an art student at Washington University in St. Louis, she continued to explore making wearable art. Recog- nizing her potential and her determination not to be limited to just one discipline, her advisers allowed her to create her own major that incorporated both sculpture and fashion. Her frst steps into the world of costume design came as something of an accident, after a staf person at Opera Teatre of Saint Louis spotted her work in a student exhibit and rec- ommended that she apply for a summer job in the company’s craft department. “In that role, I was working with some of the biggest names in costume design at that moment. One of them was Marty Pakledinaz, and he ofered to review my portfolio. When he saw my work, he said, ‘You should do this.’” With that vote of confdence, after graduating Heryer moved to Chicago to work with Redmoon Teater. “Teir method was putting a physical performer in the room, a musician in the room, and a designer in the room and you just create from there,” Heryer says. “Tat was always my happy place.” Her work with Redmoon led to projects with prestigious compa- nies including Steppenwolf and Second City, which in turn led her to decide to pursue an MFA in theatrical design at University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, she took a position at the Kansas City Art Institute’s fber program. “Tat was the frst time that I’d ever taught within an art context, and that was where I started to think about how I could teach costume diferently,” she says. “With costume, the body is the canvas, which lives on the larger canvas of the stage. When creating a work of art, whether it’s a costume or a fber-arts sculpture, you have to have both of those visual skill sets,” she refects. “I’ve always really wanted to create a program that just taught the skill sets that are related to costume design and textile design, and