Lecture: Negro Cloth, Enslaved People, and Legacy of Lowell Manufacturing

Join Dr. Jonathan Michael Square on February 19 at TAC for an in-depth exploration of the history of negro cloth and its pivotal role in the American fashion industry, with a focus on its production in Lowell, Massachusetts. The talk will also examine how enslaved individuals utilized textiles as a form of self-fashioning in the face of the deprivation of their self-hood.
Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is the Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He earned a PhD from New York University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from Cornell University. Previously, he taught in the Committee on Degree in History and Literature at Harvard University and was a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, he curated the exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery at the Herron School of Art and Design, which closed in January 2023. In 2025, he curated the exhibitions Rendering Revolution at Parsons School of Design and Almost Unknown, The Afric-American Picture Gallery at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library . A proponent of the use of social media as a form of radical pedagogy, Dr. Square also leads the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.

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