Threads of Tradition: A Design Collection Exhibit Opens

For Tammie Pontsler, a designer and educator in Grand Rapids, Michigan, fashion is a means of conveying culture, values, historical periods, and identity. Her newest design collection, created for an MFA degree from Savannah College of Art and Design, is a visual representation of her family’s emigration story. The silhouettes of the garments lean heavily into fashion from the 1910s, the decade when her great-grandmother emigrated. The collection displays themes of preservation, adaptation, assimilation, and innovation while exploring the tension between the tailored structure and bohemian ease of fashions during this decade.

She has collaborated with Norwegian-American artists who practice textile and Red-Listed folk arts, demonstrating the preservation of the culture’s past. Her use of technology, including AI, digital printing, laser cutting, flat-bed printing, and machine embroidery, reimagines these crafts as a gateway to the future. By bringing the past and the future together in conversation through fashion design, the emigration experience is visually demonstrated: leaving the homeland, holding on to traditions, adapting to the new country, thriving in the future through innovation, and a new cultural identity – the Norwegian American.

The Threads of Migration Design Collection will be on exhibit from November 8, 2026 through January 17, 2027 in the Hanson Vesterheim Commons.

Pontsler will give a presentation on Saturday, November 7 at 1:00 p.m. in the Commons. The presentation is free and open to the public.

She will also give an online presentation on Zoom on Saturday, November 21 at 3:00. Check back for the Zoom link.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to gifts to the Vesterheim Annual Fund from the Red List Textile Study Tour Participants.

For more information, click here.