Join us in celebrating the solo exhibition Anne McInnis: Full Circle ReSet. Light snacks and refreshments. Free and open to the public. 

Full Circle ReSet maps the cycles of foundation, change, returning, and becoming. The exhibition channels the social identities and lived experiences of a shared population: creative New Yorkers who have worked in the textile and fashion industry over the last four+ decades, from the late 1970s to 2022 and beyond. As a visual narrative to complement her Ph.D. dissertation, Full Circle ReSet draws from her qualitative research. She engages with material culture to holistically tell her participants’ stories and the cycles of change. 

McInnis uses felt, wool, silk, and other fibers as materials and metaphors to explore mis/perception, connection, and alterity. As a qualitative researcher, she uses arts-based research to offer perspectives that communicate her social research in other ways through artmaking and materials. As an Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Lamar Dodd School of Art from 2021-23, McInnis experimented with diverse fibers and textiles in order to learn about their specific attributes and Western societal mis/perceptions of them. She found that mis/perceptions of wool and other fibers can be very similar to those of age, appearance, and abilities. Anne argues that using visual mediums to communicate with viewers in an all-senses manner could open perception and social transformation for other researchers and the general public. 

Artist Bio

Anne McInnis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Interiors at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, UGA. She is also a Lamar Dodd School of Art Interdisciplinary Fellow for the academic years 2021 and 2022. Originally from Atlanta, Anne attended UGA as a BFA in drawing and painting. In 1981 after her work was exhibited in the Artists in Georgia ’80 group show at the High Museum in Atlanta, she dropped out of school to live and work in New York as an artist. She accidentally fell into the textile industry where she enjoyed a decades-long career in textile design and product development in the fashion and soft furnishings industries. After completing her BA in Visual Arts in 2017 at SUNY Empire College in the city, she returned to UGA as a graduate student. 

McInnis’s academic research examines creative collaboration across age and experience levels between multiple generations. Living in NYC for nearly four decades and working as a creative professional in the fashion and textile industry, she has tracked and experienced the global shifts in creative labor and technology that have reshaped textile and clothing production and consumption. Her work is a new take on the social aspects of fashion that challenges the industry’s problem with ageism and its extreme focus on youth culture.

Her research has been published in Fashion Practice (2021), and International Journal of Fashion Practice (2021), and presented at international and domestic symposiums. She has an upcoming chapter in the Routledge book, Responsible Fashion Series: Can Fashion Save the World? April 2023. She intends to graduate with a Ph.D. in Textile Sciences in Spring 2023.