Georgia O'Keeffe : Living Modern

Review of: Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern, Brooklyn Museum, New York, March 3-July 23 2017. Exhibitions of fashion in museums, whether collections based on theme, designer, or collector, have become commonplace in the past decade. However, everyday garments continue to be relegated to dress history collections, their exhibition rarely garnering the critical acclaim or commercial success that has become customary for shows of haute couture. In this exhibition, the work of O'Keeffe is accompanied by her everyday garments, her shoes, and her cotton bandanas. Far from this convergence of work with attire being trivial, sexist, or beside the point, this exhibition elucidates the intimate connection between the body of the artist and the work that this body produces. Not only is clothing deeply connected to identity, personal and social, but it is deeply connected to the body, both physical and emotional. There is an interdependence between clothes and the body, whereby the body relies on clothes to render it "culturally visible" and clothes rely on the body to animate and enliven them (Wilson 2004). In being worn, clothes receive a human imprint, shaped by our touch and our smell ( Stallybrass [2012] 2015). In wearing clothes, the body also receives the imprint of these garments; constrained by sleeves and waists, collars and hems, the movements of the body are shaped by the actions the garments allow. As such, the clothes that an artist wears not only have an effect on her identity, but also on the work she produces.