CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/4/2022

Rizzoli presents 'Garmenting' with Alexandra Schwartz, Lydia Brawner and Enoch Cheng

Thursday, May 19 at 6PM, Rizzoli Bookstore presents the launch of Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Arts and Design. Curator Alexandra Schwartz, artist Enoch Cheng and Museum of Arts and Design Deputy Director for Education Lydia Brawner will discuss the exhibition and book, which look at the use of clothing as a medium of visual art by 35 international artists. The panel will be moderated by Alida Jekabson, Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design. Please register here.

Chronicling contemporary art’s engagement with costume, Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, shows how visual artists around the globe are using garments to examine issues of subjectivity, identity and difference. Featuring 35 international artists, Garmenting is organized around five interrelated themes: functionality, cultural difference, gender, activism and performance.

Pioneered by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, garmenting as an artistic strategy emerged during the 1960s and ’70s, and came to further prominence during the 1990s, with work by artists such as Nick Cave, Yinka Shonibare and Andrea Zittel, and has flourished in recent years.

Artists include: Xenobia Bailey, Raphaël Barontini, Sanford Biggers, Karina Bisch, Zoë Buckman, Nick Cave, Enoch Cheng, Sylvie Fleury, Jeffrey Gibson, Annette Messager, Mark Newport, Raul de Nieves, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz, Jacolby Satterwhite, Devan Shimoyama, Yinka Shonibare, Mary Sibande, Franz Erhard Walther and Saya Woolfalk.

Ayoung Yu, DMZ Performance (performance still), 2020.

Dr. Alexandra Schwartz is the curator of Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, at the Museum of Arts and Design and an Adjunct Professor at SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology. Her upcoming and recent exhibitions include 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2022), Ed Ruscha: OKLA at the Oklahoma Contemporary (2021), and As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings at the Clark Art Institute (2017). She is the author of Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s (University of California Press, 2015) and Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2010), and the co-editor of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 2010). Schwartz previously held curatorial positions at MoMA and the Montclair Art Museum and has taught at Columbia, Fordham, and the University of Michigan, among other institutions.

Lydia Brawner is the Maude and Rodney Starkey Deputy Director for Education at the Museum of Arts and Design. She received her PhD and MA from NYU's Department of Performance Studies and previously served as MAD's Associate Curator of Public Programs. Before MAD, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at New York's Performa. She has taught at CUNY, NYU, and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Enoch Cheng is an artist whose practice spans moving image, installation, curating, dance, events, theatre, writing, fashion and performance. His works explore recurrent themes of place, travel, cross-cultural history, fiction, memory, time, migration and extinction. He was a grantee of Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2020); artist-in-residence at American Museum of Natural History, New York (2020); Laureate, Institut Francais, Paris (2018); and artist-fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2017–2018).

Alida Jekabson (Moderator) is a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) and was the project manager for Garmenting. In her role at MAD, she provides research and administrative support for numerous traveling and in-house exhibitions that challenge and dismantle traditional hierarchies between art, craft and design. Her research focuses on modern art from Latin America and Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on craft, dress and folk traditions. She holds an MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from CUNY Hunter College, where she worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Adjunct Lecturer.

Louise Bourgeois, Blue Days, 1996.

Garmenting Book Launch
Rizzoli Bookstore
Thursday, May 19: 6PM
1133 Broadway
New York, NY 10010