SECOND SKIN

Southampton Arts Center is pleased to announce Second Skin, a group exhibition exploring the intersection of art and fashion. Showcasing works by 15 international artists, the exhibition positions clothing as a powerful medium for articulating identity, expressing gender and cultural differences and advancing political activism. 

Curated by Latin American art scholar Estrellita B. Brodsky, Second Skin presents approximately 30 works from the early 1950s to the present, with a strong emphasis on Latin America. The exhibition features photography sculpture, textiles, wearable objects and archival material, including various prints from Martine Gutierrez’ acclaimed Indigenous Woman and a selection of Andy Warhol works on paper from the Jordan D. Schnitzer Foundation.

Conceived as a sequel to Spin a Yarn, an exhibition presented at Guild Hall in spring 2024 that explored textiles as tools of storytelling, this new chapter shifts the focus to fashion as wearable, lived objects that can serve as critical sites.  Included are artists who use dress and visual representation to shape narratives of identity, power, and cultural memory. Bringing together practitioners who interrogate the sociopolitical relationship between the body and fashion, the exhibition positions clothing as a determining site for articulating both individual and collective identity.

The exhibition unfolds through the three thematically curated galleries. The first highlights fashion as markers of identity, the second examines garments as protective devices, and the third considers clothing as consumer products within global markets. Across these spaces, sculpture, photography, video, wearable technology, and speculative fashion trace the multiple roles that clothes play in society. 

Moving beyond the notion of fashion as ornament or superficial decoration, the exhibition explores how fashion functions as a site where identities are constructed, commodified, resisted and critically reclaimed.