Power Clashing: Clothing, Collage, and Contemporary Identities

Exhibition

Samantha Lyons, curator

November 18, 2017–March 4, 2018

Gallery 408, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

Power Clashing: Clothing, Collage and Contemporary Identities explores the material and symbolic language of clothing in a variety of mediums and cultures from the 1960s to the present. Inspired by the legacy of Mimi Smith’s groundbreaking Steel Wool Peignoir (1966), one of the first works of art to use clothing as sculpture, this exhibition brings together artists who examine the ways cloth and collage function, and even overlap, as social and aesthetic forms. Just as Smith’s Steel Wool Peignoir poignantly wove together unexpected material combinations, the objects presented in this exhibition offer multiple takes on how collage and clothing render new forms that stitch together diverse—and often conflicting—materials, influences, identities, and meanings.