The Arts: Uncommon Apparel

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 offers students the same creative versatility she has sought in her own career. 

Launched in 2019, Textile Arts is an elective track for students 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 find their own path,” she says. “What I love about the BFA program is that we encourage these kinds of intersections to happen.”

HERYER’S MOTHER and grandmother taught her to sew as a child growing up in Kansas City, Missouri. This 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. Recognizing 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 first steps into the world of costume design came as something of an accident, after a staff person at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis spotted her work in a student exhibit and recommended 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 offered to review my portfolio. When he saw my work, he said, ‘You should do this.’”

With that vote of confidence, after graduating Heryer moved to Chicago to work with Redmoon Theater. “Their 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. “That was always my happy place.”

Her work with Redmoon led to projects with prestigious companies 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 fiber program. “That was the first time that I’d ever taught within an art context, and that was where I started to think about how I could teach costume differently,” 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 fiber-arts sculpture, you have to have both of those visual skill sets,” she reflects.

With costume, the body is the canvas, which lives on the larger canvas of the stage.

“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 let the student decide whether they want to become a fashion designer or work in the entertainment industry or do conceptual performance art,” she says.

To that end, she helps students tailor an educational experience that suits their desires. “I’ve got a student right now who’s developing a portfolio around sustainable textiles where she’s creating her own leather out of mushrooms, weaving and dyeing grasses and creating shoes,” she says. Others are pursuing inclusive and sustainable fashion, soft sculpture, live performance and stop motion. Students are also beginning to build portfolios around textiles for augmented reality, virtual reality and video games. “I love that students are thinking about how to create a new world within the industry,” she says.

THE TEXTILE ARTS program is still small, but thanks to a significant donation of looms and other weaving equipment from the now defunct Oregon College of Art and Craft, Heryer and the School of Art + Design faculty plan to expand it. Their goals include launching a certificate program in conjunction with the School of Business and a pre-college program for high school students interested in apparel and textile design.

Additionally, thanks to a gift from Sue Horn-Caskey and Charles F. Caskey that funded her professorship, Heryer plans to launch new outreach initiatives, including guest workshops on surface design and digital weaving that will be open to the public, as well as international collaborations, alumni support resources and open-source publications around issues of sustainability and inclusive design.

“One of the reasons I came to PSU is its motto, ‘Let knowledge serve the city,’” Heryer says. With that ethos in mind, she is dedicated to making the Textile Arts program an asset to the University, the Portland creative community and beyond.