Dallas Museum of Art will present Elena Kanagy-Loux, Collections Specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as she talks about 16th- and 17th-century European portraiture in which elaborate lace bursts forth from the collars and cuffs of the nobility like otherworldly blossoms.

Kanagy-Loux is a descendent of the Amish and grew up between the U.S. and Japan, where she was immersed in both traditional Mennonite craft and the DIY fashion scene in Tokyo's Harajuku neighborhood. After receiving her BFA in Textile Design from FIT, she won a grant that funded a four-month trip to study lacemaking across Europe in 2015.

Upon returning to New York, she co-founded the Brooklyn Lace Guild, an organization dedicated to the preservation of lacemaking, and began teaching bobbin lace classes at the Textile Arts Center. In 2018 she completed her MA in Costume Studies at NYU, where she based her thesis on interviews with lacemakers that she conducted on her European travels. Currently, she is the Collections Specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This program is part of the exhibition "Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks."