In the spring of 2004, Lane Hall hosted fiber artist Margo Mensing's installation "Red Bibs: Common and Uncommon Occurrences." In this provocative display, Mensing hung historical bibs interposed with modern photographs and exhaustive "documentation" of the origin, cultural meanings and histories of the bibs. At first the exhibit seemed conventional in its use of standard museum and academic practices, but closer examination revealed that Mensing had seamlessly interwoven fact and fiction in a most unconventional way. In a review for Surface Design: the Journal of the Surface Design Association , Polly Ullrich writes: "…Mensing's clever narratives accompanying her bibs are more like short stories which mingle truth, half-truth and outright falsity within apparently rigorous procedures."
The first bib in the exhibition, purportedly dating from 1885, was The Spilt Milk Bib . Next to it hung an essay which quotes a young frontier mother in Nebraska writing to a friend in Virginia: "Finally, I am able to put away James' bib," she writes, adding that her infant son had worn the unwashed bib for the entire first year of his life, as a talisman to ward off illness and misfortune. "From the moment he was born, bluish and puny, I despaired of him living. Having buried three before him, I do believe I had occasion to worry." These heartwrenching words, we are told, are the "only written documentation" of an old, superstitious belief that preserving babies' milk-soiled bibs will also preserve their lives.
Another bib, Gold Rain for Fetus Three, was described as knitted by a Japanese woman after her third abortion, and placed in a cave as remembrance. In actuality, the Japanese Jizo Cave on Sado Island is filled up with hundreds of effigies honoring dead fetuses.
Kathryn Hixon of the New Art Examiner describes the exhibit as "a series of riffs on what a seemingly uninspired item of baby clothes could symbolize." Viewers came away from the exhibit still uncertain about what in it was "true," but nonetheless moved to deeper examination of the authority of museums and researchers to contextualize art and thereby tell us the meaning of what we see.
Co-sponsored by the Women's Studies Program