Reflections of Culture
Examine how what people wear tells who they are.
Learn how individuals around the world communicate information about themselves as they explore many forms of personal adornment, including traditional and contemporary clothing, jewelry, and body art.
Reflections of Culture draws from Fernbank’s permanent collections – featuring the Dorothy Methvin McClatchey Collection – to showcase the fascinating similarities among cultures throughout the world and the different ways of expressing cultural information through the things people create and wear.
This exhibit focuses on the most personally expressive of those objects: personal adornment. Individuals around the world decorate their bodies with clothing, jewelry, and various forms of body modification, including piercing, scarring, painting, shaping, and tattooing. Personal adornment allows people to express their cultural identity and provides a particularly effective means of communicating social, political, and economic information about themselves and the society in which they live.
Discover what culture is and how it is expressed through a variety of contemporary and historic objects. Artifacts are placed alongside captivating photographs, which provide a context for how the objects are worn, by whom, and why. Educational offerings throughout the gallery allow visitors to further explore how personal adornment is used to express culture.
