The Mary W. Baskett Collection

The Mary W. Baskett Gallery (G136)

Over six decades, Mary W. Baskett built a joyful collection of avant-garde fashion and works of art created by boundary-breaking artists from Japan. Inspired and informed by her scholarly study and deep appreciation of Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, Baskett built her collection with both a curator’s eye and an abiding intuition. Baskett was keenly interested in how contemporary fashion design converses with other forms of creative practice across media and art-historical eras.

Baskett’s journey in bringing the study and appreciation of the arts of Japan to Cincinnati encompassed her time as curator of prints at the Cincinnati Art Museum (1965 until 1971), professor at the University of Cincinnati, gallerist and collector, and eventually came full circle as a philanthropist and donor. This arc is remarkable in its scope and speaks to a dedication to both study and our city. Baskett’s gift to the Cincinnati Art Museum establishes a gallery for the display of work from the Fashion Arts and Textiles collection and significantly expands the museum’s holdings of contemporary Japanese art, broadening the stories and the connections shared between fashion and other forms of artwork that we may now explore in Cincinnati.

Gesture and Meaning

Fashion is an art form that lives. Designers create with their own intent—and from there onward their art objects, imbued with one slate of original aesthetic and functional intentions, go on to live with us, on and around us. The life we live in garments compounds upon the work of the artist, our movement through the world in these pieces making that art partly our own and conveying meaning to those around us.

Mary W. Baskett focused her fashion collection on the forward-thinking designers Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto, choosing their visions to live with and combine with her own to convey her inner world outward. Her faithful collection of their designs between 1977 and 2026 offers a view of the arc of each designer’s career. These cross sections also offer an opportunity to explore how their sensibilities intersect with those of other artists—like the painter Shiryu Morita, whose works of single-gesture abstract calligraphy Baskett also brought to Cincinnati. Baskett’s collection invites us to consider the gestures and histories held in worn garments; the poignancy of a life lived as artful gesture; and the gift’s own gesture—carrying meaning outward from the self and forward through time.