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 and registered with the United States Copyright Office in 2005. The poem received early institutional recognition when it was curated into the International Museum of Women's Image and Identity exhibit in 2007. The broader conceptual history of using survivor accounts and representations of clothing to expose the victim-blaming premise of the question also predates the first physical installation. In 2005, Simmerling was working as a volunteer with Anne K. Ream's The Voices and Faces Project (now the Center for Story and Witness), together with Chicago-based photographer and survivor Patricia "Patsy" Evans. Simmerling and Evans conceived and planned an art installation based on Simmerling's poem in which survivors would contribute their own accounts of what they were wearing when they were assaulted, together with representations of the clothing. They were not able to realize that installation at the time.

In 2013, 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. Simmerling's authorship and earlier work with Evans, Ream's role in bringing the poem into that setting, and Brockman and Wyandt-Hiebert's development and realization of the first physical installation and sustained work over more than a decade to expand the exhibits' global reach are each important parts of the history.

Curatorial Lineage of the TWQP Framework

Simmerling's curatorial model was shaped by her encounters with distinct traditions of memorial witness, including Yad Vashem, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, and memorial exhibitions and archives documenting the Indian Residential School system in Canada. These histories are distinct. The shared curatorial lesson is that objects, images, testimony, and records can document systemic violence without reducing those harmed to abstractions or numbers.

The poem, Simmerling and Evans's earlier installation concept, Brockman and Wyandt-Hiebert's 2014 physical installation and subsequent model, later replications, and The Wrong Questions Project's expanded framework are related but distinct contributions.