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Welcome back to another installment of Mystery Monday and our second work celebrating Pride month. Look closely at this detail. Unlike many of the pieces featured here, this one is on display in Yue-Kong Pao Hall of Visual and Performing Arts. Do you know this artist? Bonus points if you know what he calls this series. Put your answers below to have a chance to pick a future Mystery Monday artwork.
Did you guess Nick Cave (b. 1959) and his iconic Soundsuits? Cave is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who lives in Chicago with his husband Bob Faust, an influential designer. Born in Missouri as one of eight boys, Cave studied dance with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater In New York and fiber arts at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Cranbrook Academy before beginning his career as a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he continues to work to the current day.
The Soundsuits are wearable art objects featuring enveloping patchwork fabric bases embellished with found objects such as buttons, porcelain figures, gramophones, and children’s toys. They incorporate imagery of traditional African masquerades, quilts and other fiber arts produced in rural African American communities, references to New York’s queer ball culture of the 80s and 90s, and decorative objects found in thrift shops and flea markets. His art has been described as an “outrageous form of drag” by the Denver Post, and Cave himself states “There is a consciousness in the work that speaks about the economic world we live in, about waste and greed, the opulence of it all and the fauxness.”
While Purdue’s Soundsuits are static, Cave also designs ones to be worn and performed, making the pieces both sculpture and costume. They obscure the wearer so viewers cannot tell the race, socio-economic status, age, or sex of the performer, creating a concealing universality to the pieces. Cave has often lived as an outsider in his communities, raised in a white community in Missouri, he was also the only Black student enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute. He also publicly came out during the AIDs crisis, a time that was very fraught for gay men.
Cave has created over 500 Soundsuits in the past thirty years, many of which are in museum collections such as Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, AR; Newfields in Indianapolis, IN; the Met in New York, New York; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. Purdue University owns two on display at the entrance of Pao Hall. They were purchased with funds from the Lonsford Endowment. If you are on campus, make sure to swing by and marvel at the complexity of these works and see you next week for another Mystery Monday.
Title: Soundsuit
Artist: Nick Cave (b. 1959), American
Date: 2012
Medium: Fabric, fiber, beads, porcelain figures, metal, sequins
Technique: Assembling
Accession number: SC21