Join projects+gallery for a talk with curator of “Fashioning the Black Body” Dario Calmese and artists Kenturah Davis, Basil Kincaid and Katherine Simóne Reynolds.

“Fashioning the Black Body” is a new mixed-media exhibition organized by artist and curator Dario Calmese. On view from March 15, 2019 through May 4, 2019, this project surveys how fashion, style, and the garment act as devices of investigative storytelling. Featured artists include: Bisa Butler, Soly Cissé, Renee Cox, David Antonio Cruz, Kenturah Davis, Hassan Hajjaj, Basil Kincaid, Mario Moore, Chris Ofili, Fahamu Pecou, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Jacolby Satterwhite, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley.

As a form of identification, self-actualization, and agency, the select artists engage the fashion object from various points of its ontogeny. In turn, “Fashioning the Black Body” becomes a dialogue about space: the space between black skin and cloth, the space that exists between the historically commodified and fetishized black body, and the space claimed for one’s self-defined identity.

“Far from the reaches of frivolity – a domain to which fashion is usually relegated – Black people have continually engaged the fashion object beyond its utilitarian functions into a device of pride, protection, resistance and camouflage,” states curator Dario Calmese.

Through the work of these artists, the Black body is transubstantiated into a semipermeable membrane between the gaze and the contents it holds – and more concretely – the tenuous distances between who we are, who we want to be, and how we are perceived.