Power Clashing: Clothing, Collage, and Contemporary Identities

Exhibition

Exhibition Overview

Power Clashing: Clothing, Collage, and Contemporary Identities
Power Clashing: Clothing, Collage, and Contemporary Identities
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.

Exhibition images

Works of art

Miriam Schapiro
Robert Kushner
untitled, circa 1980
James Rosenquist
Romare Howard Bearden
Walter Bernard
Andrew Raftery; RISD Print Editions
Catherine Dreiss
Michael E. Ott
Art Student, late 1900s
Renée Stout; Pyramid Atlantic
Mimi Smith
Benny Andrews
Sewer, 1970
Roger Shimomura
Sansei Woman, 1980
unrecorded Hausa-Fulani artist
Kehinde Wiley; Art Production Fund
Nikki S. Lee
Shelley Niro
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
What is an American?, 2001–2003
unrecorded Hausa-Fulani artist
Andrew Raftery; RISD Print Editions
Andrew Raftery; RISD Print Editions
Andrew Raftery; RISD Print Editions

Events

November 30, 2017
Screening
5:30–7:30PM
Spencer Museum of Art Auditorium, Rm 309
January 21, 2018
Talk
2:00–3:00PM
Spencer Museum of Art, Kemper Family Foundations Balcony, 408
February 17, 2018
Activity
1:00–4:00PM
Spencer Museum of Art, Kemper Family Foundations Balcony, 408
March 4, 2018
Talk
2:00–3:00PM
Spencer Museum of Art, Kemper Family Foundations Balcony, 408