Erica Baum, “A Long Dress”

Taking her title from a poem by Gertrude Stein, Erica Baum explores how social codes insinuate themselves into the most mundane of objects—in this case, home sewing templates, circa 1960–70. Presented as photographic enlargements, her images strip away the charming yellowed patinas of her subjects to reveal their more disquieting complicity of in the enforcement of gender roles at midcentury.