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Artwear: Fashion and Anti-fashion
4/12/2005 Legion of Honor
14 May–30 October 2005 Artwear: Fashion and Anti-fashion
Legion of Honor
14 May–30 October 2005
San Francisco, 12 April 2005--Artwear: Fashion and Anti-fashion is a lively and engaging retrospective look at wearable art as it has grown and changed over the past 35 years. The exhibition of approximately 120 objects will chart the genre’s development from embroidered and crocheted hippie style, to grand, one-of-a-kind woven, knitted, and dyed garments that are equally at home on the body and on the wall, to the more fashion-oriented works of the 1990s.
Curated for the Fine Arts Museums by Melissa Leventon, principal of Curatrix Group Museum Consultants and former Fine Arts Museums Curator of Textiles, Artwear will feature the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with about 30 percent of the objects on view drawn from the museum’s holdings. The eclectic and provocative display will be augmented by works in public and private collections in the United States and abroad. Many of the pioneers of the genre live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they will be featured along with artists from elsewhere in the United States, and from Europe and Asia. In August, mid-way through the span of
the exhibition, approximately a quarter of the costumes on display will change in a rotation of the works.
Leventon, who began working with wearable art in the early 1990’s, says, “Artwear is a branch of fiber art. Its practitioners are artists who have a fine arts background and who create works of art made from their own hand-made textiles.” Wearable art sprang from counterculture street fashions of the 1960s. Its development in its twin centers of the Bay area and New York was influenced by the era’s feminism, interest in non-western cultures, movements like Pop Art, and the development of studio craft practice. The term encompasses one-of-a-kind works, limited editions, and costumes made for performance. Artwear can be said to occupy the intersection between art, craft, and fashion: it is first and foremost an art of materials and processes, and its creators, most of whom are women, are passionate about making art with textiles. Despite its fashionable origins, the creators of artwear have set their works apart from fashion; yet the genre has been drawn inexorably closer to fashion ever since
its inception.
The exhibition will also chart new territory, such as the performance aspect of artwear as exemplified by artists such as Kaisik Wong, Seattle’s Friends of the Rag, and New Yorker Pat Oleszko. Wearable art’s relationship to the popular use of unwearable garments as artistic metaphor will also be explored. In addition, the exhibition will set artwear in context as one in a long line of art and dress reform movements by including costumes from its antecedents, such as the Wiener Werkstätte, Mariano Fortuny, and Liberty of London. Related trends in contemporary fashion will be examined as well, with the inclusion of works by designers such as Kansai Yamamoto and Issey Miyake.
Organization
Artwear: Fashion and Anti-fashion is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, entitled Artwear: Fashion and Anti-fashion, published by the Fine Arts Museums in collaboration with Thames & Hudson. The catalogue is supported, in part, by the Friends of Fiber Art International.
160 pages, ca. 200 color images, 9 x 12 inches. $29.95, paperbound. Available in the Museum Stores.
Admission Fees
There is a $2 surcharge for the exhibition. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors, $5 for youths 12–17, and children 11 and under are free. General admission is waived every Tuesday from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., for Ford Free Tuesdays, thanks to the Ford Motor Company Fund; however the $2 special exhibition fee is still in effect. There is a $2 discount on paid admission upon presentation of a valid MUNI transfer or Fast Pass.
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