For Sarah W. Mallory, a culture’s creative output is interwoven with memory, power dynamics, and even resistance. As a graduate of the MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies program—offered jointly by Parsons and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum—Mallory has cultivated a practice that is deeply historical and resolutely political, using materials such as textiles as both subject and symbol in her curatorial and scholarly work. 

Mallory came to the program with a strong interest in the ways race, gender, and power shape everyday objects. At Parsons, she focused on the social history of textiles in the Americas, exploring fabric as a medium of storytelling and resistance in the African diaspora. She contributed to curatorial projects at Cooper Hewitt and beyond, examining the tension between history and decorative beauty.

Mallory’s work extends beyond textiles, however, reflecting a broad focus on material culture and art and their role in shaping narratives of power and identity. Since 2013, she has served as the Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum, where she specializes in early modern Northern European art—particularly Dutch and Flemish works on paper—and oversees a collection that includes over 800 drawings and more than 500 Rembrandt etchings. She previously held positions at other major institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection. In addition to working as a curator, Mallory is a writer, speaker, and educator, bringing historical insight to contemporary conversations on race, representation, and justice in the arts. In 2021, she co-organized the international conference Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures.

Mallory has contributed to exhibitions and initiatives that center Black material culture and challenge conventional boundaries between craft and fine art and between utility and ornament. Through her scholarship and curatorial practice Mallory elevates the political dimension of design and promotes the recovery of overlooked legacies in the decorative arts. 

Since receiving her MA from Parsons in 2021, Mallory has continued to build on the material culture research practices she refined during her time in the program. In the exhibitions, publications, and public programming she creates, Mallory reveals the often unseen ways objects shape our understanding of history, culture, and belonging.