Image credits: Garmenting exhibition at Museum of Art & Design, New York. Left: Saya Woolfalk, Mindfulness Activated Future Possibility Generator Storage System and Access Point, 2022. Center: Wall Didactic. Right: Kent Monkman, Miss Chief’s Tipi Dress (Red), 2020.
Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, guest curated by Alexandra Schwartz, is a brilliant and visually stunning - at times surprising, often quite humorous - exhibition now on at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. We were lucky enough to attend a special walkthrough that Alix gave for colleagues last week, and to get a behind the scenes look, as it were.
A true passion project and intensively researched, the show took several years from inception to fruition, and we hope that many more curators will adopt “garmenting” as a useful lens on contemporary art.
Bringing together 35 artists from around the globe, some very well known and some lesser, the show probes the intersection of contemporary art and costume (since the 1980s on) and centers on explorations of how dress both expresses and shapes who we are - our personal, cultural and political identities. Not about fashion or fashion design, “garmenting” has to do instead with artists who engage with clothing as their medium - to create sculpture, installation, video, live performance, or some combination thereof. Garmenting opens with an installation, entitled Blue Days (1996) of simple blue dresses hung on a slightly menacing steel rack by the indomitable, multi-media artist Louise Bourgeois (who wore these blue dresses) and concludes with Esmaa Mohamoud’s powerful installation of Disney-like yellow and purple princess ball gowns, from her series One of the Boys (2017-2018), which are made of basket ball jersey material and have real Gator’s player names and numbers on their backs. Thoughtfully framed by the open-ended themes of Function, Cultural Difference, Performance, Activism, and Gender, and spread out across two floors, the works stand independently and in interesting conversations with one another, as well, of course, within the broader network of transnational garmenting histories ( some of which is discussed in the show’s terrific catalog).
Catch this fascinating and important exhibition before it closes on Sunday August 14.