Thread Magazine, Cornell’s largest art, fashion and culture magazine, held an opening reception celebrating its spring 2025 gallery exhibition titled, “Loose Threads: The Art of Curation,” on March 18.
The organization curates gallery exhibits and a bi-annual fashion magazine featuring work from their team of designers and photographers. This semester’s exhibit includes fashion photography and editorial story drafts illustrating the theme of the creative process. The gallery is open until March 27 in the Jill Stuart Gallery, within the Human Ecology Building.
In her speech at the opening reception, Thread Casting Director Alanna Stein ’28 explained that the gallery attempts to highlight the role that choice plays in curation.
“This exhibit isn’t just about fashion or art or photography,” Stein said. “It’s about choices. What we keep, what we let go of and how those decisions shape what we see, think and feel. The same set of images, rearranged, tells a different story.”
Community Director Laura Twizere ’26 said Stein came up with the idea of “the art of curation,” and the two decided to make the exhibition “a journey through the process of making our magazine.”
Twizere also emphasized that the gallery highlights the work put in by each group member in bringing the magazine from imagination to print, illustrating the team’s creative process.
“This [gallery] is a tribute to [the magazine members’] hard work and creativity — the thread that weaves our magazine together,” Twizere wrote in an email to The Sun.
Each wall of the exhibit had a different theme representing an element of the production process: ideation, selection, creation and realization.
The wall labeled “Ideation” contained a variety of mood boards organized around a central idea or theme, such as “introspectionism,” “in the house” and “the painter.” Each element contained a variety of photos pertaining to the theme, along with pages of magazine article drafts that had a crumpled appearance — as if they had been discarded — highlighting the gallery’s focus on choice and the unchosen.
One of the "Ideation" moodboards is "The Painter."
Each mood board also contained post-it notes with commentary such as “solo shot inspo” and “the messy bathroom is perfect.” According to the event bio, the notes intended to “reveal the unseen: the decisions, the labor, the dialogue between photographer and model.”
The label “Selection” represented the process of choosing photos and models to be featured within the photoshoots that make up the magazine. The wall was covered in small black-and-white photos. In front of the photos stood several larger, colorful shots, representing the final, narrowed-down selection of photos.
“The contrast between the clean, neat background and the intense tones of the pictures added to [the] emotional tension, almost like exploring the push and pull between vulnerability and strength,” wrote Cynthia Zhou ’27, a Thread general body member and gallery attendee, to The Sun. “It made me think about how we seek connection even when things feel disjointed.”
The wall labeled “Creation” held white post-it notes and pens. A sign on the wall read “As we built this exhibition, we realize ‘creation’ in the magazine process is hard to pin down. It happens in real-time.” The exhibit then invited viewers to partake in the “process” and write a note with “today’s date and time — the exact instant you stood here” on one of the post-its.
Many spectators and club members took it as an opportunity to show appreciation for the gallery organizers’ hard work and unique but impactful artistic approach. One anonymous note read, “Thank you for putting together the narrative and showing us the endless bounds of what art can be.”
One note written by a Thread member was labeled “To Laura” and read “3,000 pins, 1,209 pictures, and 8 trips to the vending machine… we finally finished!” emphasizing not only the exhibition’s vast scale, but also the camaraderie and perseverance that grew through the meticulous set-up process.
Thread Editor-in-Chief Lillian Casazza B.Arch.’28 emphasized that, while taking an abstract approach to curation and exhibition involves risk, it symbolizes the group’s desire for artistic growth and evolution.
“Going into my first semester as editor-in-chief, I knew Thread had the potential for more. More experimentation, more risks, more ways for our members to grow,” Casazza wrote in an email to The Sun. “And when you have a group of people as eager as ours, you try the new thing.”
The final wall near the exit represented “Realization,” the point in the creation process at which the curator’s artistic vision is realized. By this point, viewers have traveled on a symbolic journey through the process of creating a magazine, from start to finish. Zhou appreciated how the gallery gave spectators a window into the mind of artists.
“The Gallery felt like stepping into someone’s subconscious. The way the red threads connected different pieces created this sense of searching for meaning — like trying to piece together fragmented memories,” wrote Zhou.
The "Realization" wall illustrates the finale of the creative process.
Stein, at the end of her speech, announced that she hopes that opening this often overlooked process of creation up to the public will help gallery visitors “think about the choices shaping [their] own story — the ones made, the ones ahead, and the ones still left unseen.”
