History & Lineage

The lineage of the What Were You Wearing? exhibit begins with Dr. Mary Simmerling's poem "What I Was Wearing," written in the early 2000s about the night she was assaulted in 1987, and registered with the United States Copyright Office on March 11, 2005—the same year she completed her Ph.D. The poem received early institutional recognition when Simmerling submitted it to the International Museum of Women, which curated it into its Image and Identity exhibit in 2007.

The broader conceptual history of the exhibits also predates the first physical installation. In the early 2000s, Simmerling was a founding member of the "Wednesday Team" of The Voices and Faces Project, now the Center for Story and Witness. It was at one of those meetings that Simmerling first shared "What I Was Wearing" with that group. Together with another founding member of the Wednesday Team—Chicago-based photographer and survivor Patricia "Patsy" Evans—Simmerling conceived and planned an art installation based on the poem, in which survivors would contribute their own accounts of what they were wearing when they were assaulted, together with representations of the clothing. The two planned the installation together, though they were unable to realize it at the time.

In 2013, Anne Ream shared Simmerling's poem at a training attended by advocates Jen Brockman, then a campus sexual assault prevention educator, and Dr. Mary A. Wyandt-Hiebert, then the director of STAR Central, the sexual and relationship violence advocacy and resource office at the University of Arkansas. After encountering the poem, Brockman and Wyandt-Hiebert developed their own installation framework, obtained Simmerling's permission to use her poem, and mounted the first physical installation at the University of Arkansas in 2014.

Brockman and Wyandt-Hiebert have continued working for more than a decade to expand the exhibits’ global reach.

Curatorial Lineage of the TWQP Framework

Simmerling's curatorial approach has been shaped by memorial, archival, and human-rights practices as she experienced them at Yad Vashem, at the Chicago Historical Society's Without Sanctuary exhibition, at the 9/11 Memorial, and through virtual memorials documenting the Indian Residential School system. These experiences affected her deeply and remain with her. She does not invoke these histories as analogies or claim structural equivalence. In her own practice, she carries forward a curatorial insight: carefully sequenced objects, testimony, images, geography, and records can convey the scale of violence and loss while preserving the specificity and dignity of individual lives.

Her use of QR-linked audio and video also draws on childhood museum visits, when headsets placed voice alongside objects and records.

These are related but distinct contributions: the poem, the early conceptual installation, the first realized physical model, the global replication lineage, and the later TWQP framework.