Power Clashing: Clothing, Collage, and Contemporary Identities

This exhibition 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, Power Clashing brings together artists who examine the ways cloth and collage function, and even overlap, as social and aesthetic forms. Through a selection of modern and contemporary paintings, sculptures, textiles, and works on paper, the objects presented in this exhibition offer multiple perspectives on how collage and clothing render new forms that stitch together diverse—and often conflicting—materials, influences, identities, and meanings.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Roger Shimomura, born 1939 Seattle, Washington. Sansei Woman, 1980. acrylic on canvas. Canvas/Support: 121.92 x 106.68 cm
Canvas/Support: 48 x 42 in/ Gift of Dean and Ginny Graves; Jim and Gina Graves Lloyd 2011.0022