DRESS CODE
Newport Art Museum
May 6, 2023 - October 15, 2023
Curated in collaboration with Megan Horn, Curatorial Assistant
Dress Code brings together emerging, mid-career, and established artists who explore how fashion functions as a language for personal expression where articles of clothing are like a broad vocabulary carrying weights of meanings. Through fashion design, photography, performance, and new media these artists reveal the power of our multilayered relationships to clothing while offering new ways of expressing materiality, identity and the body. By breaking the “norms” of dress, the artists in this exhibition present their bodies and selves on their own terms.
Clothing + personal style
are like a language that can shape how we are seen. Without a doubt, both can be tools for personal expression, camouflage, or a protective armor. Within the language of getting dressed, garments carry multiple connotations of gender, class, and cultural identity.
How does the act of getting dressed involves negotiating codes each day, whether consciously or not? What are the social norms to dressing 'feminine' or 'masculine'? And how does the body become a political and social site for challenging who believe they have the authority to determine these codes?
