It was a tour through the Tenement Museum that gave Mellány Sánchez the idea for “Objects of Permanence,” a new show she curated at the Lower East Side’s Abrons Arts Center. “The Tenement Museum is the number one school trip as an NYC public school kid,” she said. “And my understanding of those tours and those rooms is that these people’s worlds and their lives are preserved through their homes.” Even though no one lives there anymore, the objects contained in those homes continue to tell their stories. “That led me to understand that legacy really has an opportunity to live in our belongings and our things if we see it that way.”
Sánchez continues: “Ali Rosa-Salas, the vice president of visual and performing arts at Henry Street Settlement, was curious to tell a story that tied Abrons and Henry Street back to the fashion industry, especially because she’d heard that the textile collections that were initially housed here had gone on to be part of The Met’s Costume Institute.” She and her curatorial collaborator Aldo Araujo got in touch with The Met and found out that the Neighborhood Playhouse, which was founded in 1915 and now houses the Abrons Arts Center, was the city’s first commitment to supporting garment production as an artistic craft. Its collection of costumes was used in 1937 to found the Museum of Costume Art, which was later acquired by The Met to form its Costume Institute. “So there’s this wonderful, rich history [that connects the two], and that almost was the spark that made us follow this path and see what it could be,” said Sánchez.
For the show, Sánchez re-created a tenement apartment belonging to Ramonita Saez Velez, who came to New York from Puerto Rico post–WW II and worked in the garment district. The makeshift living rooms are filled with her own objects—like the scissors she used while working and the elegant beaded handbag she made for herself for nights out on the town—along with pieces by many of the independent designers currently calling the city home. “One of the artifacts that we have is a netting apron that belonged to Ramonita, and I love it because it really represents her lifestyle,” said Sánchez. “It’s an apron, but it’s totally ornamental, and it speaks to the ways in which she was a matriarch, not only in her family but within her community, the way she welcomed everyone into her home.”
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The inclusion of contemporary designers like Willy Chavarria, Maria Cornejo, Christopher John Rogers, and Dylan Cao and Jin Kay from Commission furthers the connection between the garment district and New York’s standing as one of the world’s fashion capitals—especially given that many of the designers moved here from elsewhere to fulfill their dreams of a better life. In Ramonita’s imagined living room hangs a series of garments by Cornejo and Commission, whose work is primarily manufactured in the garment district. Emily Adams Bode Aujla contributed pieces from her vast vintage archive—which hang from a clothesline and are visible through one of the living-room windows—as well as clothes from her latest collection, which are inside an armoire. On one of the couches lies a pillow by the designer Kim Shui, who used a “Nuyorican family’s tablecloth” found at her factory in Midtown.
One of the highlights of the installation is a 14-minute documentary, “The Making of: LES, 2023,” a collaboration between Chavarria and the filmmaker Dani Aphrodite that shows various New Yorkers talking about their relationship to fashion and their cultural history with the fashion industry—including Chavarria himself. One of the women featured recalls how her dad used to walk around with a sewing machine on his shoulder “looking for freelance work,” while a young designer speaks about the differences and similarities between their parent—who made clothes at a factory—and themself, making the clothes they want as an art form and expression of creativity.
“The intention here was to [put the focus] on the Lower East Side,” said Araujo. “Now we’ve got the cool kids in Dimes Square, we got Nine Orchard and all these cool things happening, but do people know that the streets they walk on have so much more meaning and allowed New York to become the fashion capital that it is? Our intention of connecting the contemporary designers is to say, ‘Look at what you inherited’”—a particularly important message during New York Fashion Week. “We’re reminding people that these mostly Puerto Rican women, along with those from other migrant communities, were the backbone of the garment industry.”
