With Gender Bending Fashion, we explore the role of gender and fashion, by connecting the past and the present, highlighting the work of trailblazing designers and wearers of fashion, and creating an immersive experience worthy of these compelling garments.
We were intent on creating a celebratory setting, engaging retrofuturism as a visual theme to connect the current moment to historical precedents and the imaginative exuberance of what the future could be.
Photos by Michael Blanchard
Video by Jared Medeiros
“Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity” celebrates the identities of South Africans historically denied their rights: Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu communities; women of color; members of the LGBTQI community; and rural citizens, among others. Many of the artists featured in the exhibition explore the way that clothing communicates identity, documenting the fashion choices of brave individuals challenging the social norms of their times. Others examine how clothing has been used to create or erase cultural identity, or to enforce class divisions.
The design references the graphically striking painted houses of the Ndebele people of South Africa. This same graphic treatment features in the beadwork on display. The platforms take their cue from the traditional neck and leg ornaments of the Ndebele.
#techstyle explores how the synergy between fashion and technology is not only changing the way designers design, but also the way people interact with their clothing. The exhibition draws on the MFA’s collection of contemporary fashion and accessories, and features key pieces from innovators in the field including a digitally-printed dress from Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection (Spring/Summer 2010/2011) and Iris van Herpen’s 3-D printed dress (2013) produced in collaboration with MIT designer and assistant professor Neri Oxman. Special commissions include work by CuteCircuit, Hussein Chalayan, Kate Goldsworthy, and Somerville-based Nervous System.
We wanted to create a singular setting for fashion and technology, adding in the elements of fantasy and extravagance from the fashion sphere, which, in their own form, are native to technological explorations.
Video by Jared Medeiros
Henri Matisse—who revolutionized 20th-century art—believed that a treasured group of objects was instrumental to his studio practice. “Matisse in the Studio” was the first major international exhibition to examine the importance of Matisse’s personal collection of objects, offering unprecedented insight into the great artist's creativity.
The window figured prominently in Matisse’s paintings. This architectural apparatus functioned as a way of collapsing foreground, middle ground, and background, connecting disparate objects in his domestic settings. In this show, the window allows visitors the opportunity to see the objects collaged with one another as they move throughout the exhibit. The window also affords the visitor the ability to encounter the same object from different vantage points, at different moments of the show. The viewer gets to enact the same kind of re-discovery that Matisse did with these objects throughout his life.
To tell the story of multi-disciplinary artists who were fluent in multiple languages and art forms, the exhibition design takes up the challenge of code-switching. Basquiat was a master code-switcher, moving freely and appreciated commensurably between the realms of graffiti art and the downtown gallery scene.
Throughout the different galleries in the show, the same formal moves, colors, and materials show up remixed and reinterpreted, switching their codes in various contexts. The visitor descends into the entry space where we allude to a NYC subway platform, and, through the main doors, visitors are transported to a Chelsea art gallery, a portrait gallery, a dance club, and even an Afrofuturistic spaceship. The same fluorescent lighting, flooring, and paint colors appear in different spots throughout, shapeshifting in relationship to these different contexts.
The casework is designed to underscore the multi-disciplinary work of these artists. The work is displayed tiered in a dynamic fashion to emphasize this energetic output in all different forms from these artists.
With the barrier line in front of the paintings and the strong linear lighting elements throughout the galleries, the design underscores the vitality of the Line and writing in the artwork.
Eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture, and bapo refers to the damaged cultural ephemera hyper-realistically depicted in the paintings—worm-eaten calligraphies, partial book pages, burned paintings, remnants of rubbings and torn-open letters. They are usually arranged in a haphazard, collage-like composition, created with Chinese ink and colors on paper or silk. When bapo emerged, this unexpected imagery was radically distinct from classical Chinese landscape and figure painting, and became popular among an aspiring urban middle class delighted by its visual trickery and sophistication.
Partically-enclosing walls, broken and overlapping, allow the visitor to make connections across the gallery to different objects in the show. The show manifests the same shard-like imagery on the scrolls. One wall features an exploded diagram of the objects featured on a bapo scroll.
This exhibition of magnificent jewelry, pottery, sculpture, metalwork, and more from the MFA’s collection of ancient Nubian art examines power, representation, and cultural bias—in the ancient world, in the early 20th century, and today. Through a majestic display of art and objects, “Ancient Nubia Now” confronts past misinterpretations and offers new ways of understanding Nubia’s history and contemporary relevance.
VR walkthrough made by our friends at Archimedes Digital, special thanks to Luke Hollis: https://archimedes.digital/
The MFA’s Arts of Islamic Cultures Gallery is designed to expand how visitors see and understand the diverse arts of Islamic cultures. Its thematic installation—developed through an intensive eight-year process of engagement with Islamic, artistic, and scholarly communities—is divided into distinct spaces that reflect the richness of these artistic traditions. Some sections explore art forms that are integral to all Islamic cultures, like Arabic calligraphy, while others focus on unique visual traditions such as that of Ottoman Turkey or Mughal India. Still other sections delve deeply into the history of singular objects in the collection, for example a remarkable door assembled from fragments of medieval Egyptian woodwork for the first American World’s Fair.
GSD Core Studio; Critic: Felipe Correa
This studio in Queens began with the design of an urban framework and continued with the design/integration of a large-scale public building within this framework. The site is a 170-acre catchment area called Willets Point in Corona, Queens. Although it has rich adjacencies to a waterfront, transportation, airport infrastructures, and Citifield (formerly Shea Stadium), it has become a provisional urban zone of temporary industrial buildings and polluted ground and waterways. Adding an atmospheric quality to the potential of the site is its adjacency to Corona Park where the 1939 World’s Fair was held. The site’s proximity to the stadium and the vast amounts of asphalt that surround it compound the problems of both urban heat island and water runoff. As the recession stalled the development pressures that would bring density and urban renewal to the area in the near future, we were given the space of time to imagine an alternate future.
For the design of this mixed-use recreational facility, I developed a mat building to extend the enclave tradition of both New York City in general and Queens in particular, I designed a space in which the densification of the program, with a rhythm of open and closed spaces would provide a destination for outsiders and residents and creates an opportunity for both private moments and public gatherings.
Deliberate Shopping and the Microcosmic Department Store
Architecture Thesis Project
Thesis Advisors: Mack Scogin + Erika Naginski
Architecture has always been implicated in the reciprocal relationship between an individual and their larger social/cultural/economic context. As an urban intervention, it can redefine our prevailing conception of the individual in society as well as the fabric of that society itself. This thesis takes a specific look at the individual through American history as a way to critique the commercialization of identity, supplanting it instead with a sense of education for a more affirmative effect on culture and society. We recognize both that an individual is constituted by the differences that emerge from his/her integration and that architecture can emphasize the latent possibilities for the individual within the city.
We can see the individual in solitude translated architecturally in two specific American products: the ranch house and the suburban ranch-style home. The frontier ranch house of the 19th century, through its cellular structure emphasized personal privacy and constituted an architecture of spatial claim. In the 1950’s, the idealization of the frontier and its lone figure reached even further into the American consciousness and was translated into the suburban ranch-style house in an effort to recall a specifically American style, both sanitized and standardized, with all its connotations of personal freedom, social ascendency through ownership, and even pastoralism.
“Masterpieces of Egyptian Sculpture from the Pyramid Age” tells the story of this artistic moment and the culture that shaped it through some of the singular landmarks of the Old Kingdom (2575–2150 BCE). The bust of Prince Ankhhaf, the man who oversaw the completion of the Great Pyramid, is the most convincing example of realistic portraiture to survive from the Old Kingdom. The pair statue of King Menkaura and queen is one of the most famous Egyptian sculptures in the world. These and every other work on display—all of them undisputed masterpieces—have been in the MFA’s collection since the first part of the 20th century, when they were excavated in Egypt by the Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition.
The adjacent gallery, “Faces of Ancient Egypt,” illustrates the breadth of approaches sculptors took in creating distinctive likeness over 2,000 years of Egyptian artistic development. From the Twelfth Dynasty and the Late Period, respectively, the Josephson and Boston Green Heads are sensitive portrayals of a nobleman and a priest with startlingly realistic features. Meanwhile, a portrait of Pharaoh Amenhotep III from the Eighteenth Dynasty smiles broadly without a single crease in its cheeks, making it more of an elegant mask than a lifelike depiction.
“Disappeared Quipu” pairs five ancient quipus on loan from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University with a newly commissioned, site-specific installation by Vicuña that combines monumental strands of knotted wool with a four-channel video projection. Together, these quipus of the past and present explore the nature of language and memory, the resilience of native people in the face of colonial repression, and Vicuña’s own experiences living in exile from her native Chile.
Reconfiguring Istanbul’s Ataturk Kopru across the Golden Horn
GSD Option Studio; Critic: Hashim Sarkis
The focus of the studio was to determine the architectural potential of an infrastructural element – a bridge in Istanbul - by reconsidering the status of infrastructure. Do we conceptualize infrastructure as a system or as an object? The site is at the foot of the Ataturk Bridge and the public navy dockyards. This land permits a series of improvements around the existing bridge including enhancing the public space at the landing of the bridge and linking the nearby neighborhood of Kasimpasa to the waterfront.
I proposed a viaduct extension of the bridge to remedy the disjuncture of the site (neighborhood to coast, neighborhood to neighbor-hood) and create a heightened experience of threshold through the logic of both bridge and viaduct. To graft onto the bridge is to continue its gesture: to join separate entities. The viaduct becomes a semi-visible, constitutive object that, like a seam, pulls its surroundings together by providing an ordering logic. This viaduct creates order by a connection to something larger than itself, physically, visually, and programmatically.
GSD Option Studio; Critic: Daniel D’Oca
Baltimore, like many cities of a metropolitan assemblage, has the inherent facility of being read, understood, and maneuvered according to different scales of understanding. It is at once a vital node of the northeast, a defining hub of the Baltimore-DC-Virginia region, and, as a city, identified by its constitutive neighborhoods, distinctive in their own right. These multiple, overlapping, and at times, nested scales provide a richness of community but also evidence inborn problems - most particularly problems of “spatial conflict” and “cross-scalar exclusions.” Spatial conflict is extant because disparate populations, according to their particular scope of understanding, lay claim to and operate on the same spaces of Baltimore. These actors require discordant levels of performance from these places, creating conflict and necessitating amelioration. Additionally, cross-scalar impediments occur because, although Baltimore may perform at metropolitan levels, the advantages of such a status may not trickle down to all of its residents. Baltimorians must be able to more easily access the returns of living in a city of such standing.
For decades, MFA visitors who read the small print have been familiar with the names of Jean and Fred Sharf. “Gift of Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf” has appeared at the bottom of hundreds upon hundreds of the labels next to artworks in our galleries. One theme does run through the Sharfs’ collection: transportation. Fred, whose energy was legendary and who was always on the move, had forever been fascinated by the great speeding up of life that occurred in the middle decades of the 20th century. Planes, trains, and, most of all, automobiles, appear over and over again in the collection, as Fred had sought to capture the excitement that accompanied the simple act of getting from one place to another at mid-century.
The exhibit tries to capture both the speed lines and stylized curves of the early to mid-century, but also the wonder and boyish fascination of such a collection.
Luminous and often haunting, Kay Nielsen’s interpretations of classic fairy tales are among the most celebrated book illustrations of the 20th century. “Kay Nielsen’s Enchanted Vision” celebrates the Danish artist’s significant achievements in illustration while highlighting some of his work in theater design and animation.
Featured here are speculative renderings of an earlier version of this exhibition.
In 2018, Weng made the largest gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy to the MFA in the institution’s history, comprising 183 objects that were acquired and passed down through six generations of his family. This exhibition features approximately 20 works from the gift that relate to concepts of family and friends.
“Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Family and Friends” includes paintings and calligraphy by some of the greatest masters from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. The intimate Suzhou Sceneries (1484–1504) album describes Shen Zhou’s travels with friends around his home regions. The calligraphy in Nine Letters to Home (1523), written by Wen Zhengming to his wife and sons, displays a spontaneity of style rarely found in the artist’s more formal works. The most recent piece in the exhibition is a handscroll painted by Wan-go H. C. Weng himself, Elegant Gathering at the Laixiju Studio (1990). The contemporary work commemorates a momentous gathering of friends—including six esteemed historians of Chinese paintings—held at the collector’s home in 1985.
“Casanova’s Europe” reveals a refined and visually seductive culture on the cusp of modernity—one characterized by pleasure seeking, movement across boundaries, and self-invention. By using his life as the basis for the exhibition, the MFA invites visitors to consider aspects of power—political, social, economic, sexual—both in Casanova’s time and today.
Three tableaux - Venice, Paris, and London - and a variety of vignettes transport the visitor to the rich interiors of Casanova’s time. They provide the fully fleshed-out setting of the art work on display while underscoring the theatricality of a life lived unconditionally.
William Merritt Chase was a brilliant observer, an innovative painter, and a leader in international art circles at the turn of the last century. The first complete examination of the artist in more than three decades, “William Merritt Chase” brought together 80 of the painter’s finest works in both oil and pastel, drawn from public and private collections across the US.
