Fine Art and Fashion Make a Gorgeous Pair at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art

There’s unexpected romance in the dark third floor gallery of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, where surprising pairings of fine art pieces and high-fashion garments team up in the museum’s latest show, Statement Pieces, presented in collaboration with the fashion collection of Barrett Barrera. These fourteen arrangements—carefully matched by Kelly Peck, the vice president of Barrett Barrera Projects and the guest fashion curator, and co-curator Sara Arnold—share an intimate space, unseparated by the typical glass barriers you might find protecting delicate clothing displays from visitors in museums across the country. For Angela Mack, who is in her sixteenth year as the Gibbes’s museum director, a “visual courtship” takes place when studying the works in tandem. “The fashion pairings have helped me see them in a different way.”

The fourteen fashion garments from Barrett Barrera, one of the world’s largest collectors of Alexander McQueen, offer an approachable entryway for many new guests to the museum. “Fashion is something that is familiar to everyone,” Mack says. “It allows our community to approach the visual arts through something they encounter on a daily basis.” In one pairing, warm yellow light from a bulb tucked beneath the bodice of a dress illuminates a waterfall of pale green tulle. The details of Molly Goddard’s Green Tulle Dress with Embroidered Flowers from her Autumn/Winter 2017 collection come alive: Waves of frills, the delicate gauzy fabric, and hand-embroidered white and pink flowers glow like a grassy, flower-dotted meadow. Getting this close to a fashion piece inside a museum is rare, and invites a closer look.

The illuminated display that goes with the dress, specially crafted by the team at Barrett Barrera, brings a new dimension to the garment and its chosen art pairing, a small but explosive Joan Mitchell painting. “The dress’s light comes through like a landscape,” Peck says. Mack explains that Mitchell’s Series: July 25 I is a rarely-exhibited piece from the museum’s permanent collection, though it was acquired decades ago, spending years in storage due to the sensitivity of the artist’s dense impasto and cracking on the surface. With support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, careful conservation efforts allowed the repaired painting to join Statement Pieces next to Goddard’s dress, where the physical glow of the dress mirrors the burst of yellow strokes from behind the foreground tangle of reds, blues, and greens on Mitchell’s canvas. The roses of Goddard’s dress echo the smears of Series: July 25 I’s cherry red.

In a pairing between Comme des Garcons’s dress from the Spring/Summer 2015 collection and Donté K. Hayes’s Sanctuary, Peck is reminded of a human heart. The swaths of red fabric along the top of the dress and the Baltimore artist’s impressionistic, rippling stoneware surface both produce a sense of beating rhythm and repetition; the round and organic shapes of the bodice and the globular top of the sculpture feel alive and full, like an organ pumping blood. Coincidentally, Hayes uses a needle tool to create texture on the surface of his ceramics—not unlike a seamstress stitching layers of fabric together. 

“I’m particularly excited for visitors to experience the dialogue between Alexander McQueen’s spring/summer 2008 kimono dress and Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print South Wind, Clear Dawn [also known as Red Fuji],” Peck says. This is the first time the team at Barrett Barrera hung the garment in a traditional kimono mounting style, with its arms outstretched, the wide sleeves falling near the hem of the piece. In this set, the saturated colors and shifting gradient is more than a common visual thread: Peck imagines that McQueen, who often looked to Japanese dress and culture for inspiration, may have studied the artwork of Hokusai during his research for his designs. 

While planning the exhibition, Peck and Arnold worked together to create resonant pairings, using a digital database to explore the Gibbes’s expansive collection before examining the works’ texture and scale in person. But everything came together when the pieces met face to face. “Experiencing the artwork in person in the museum space,” Peck says, “is where the objects and visual relationships really come to life.”