Online exhibition launches for "Fast Fashion/Slow Art"

The Museum is pleased to announce a new online exhibition that accompanies Fast Fashion/Slow Art, which went on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in January. The exhibition, originally scheduled to be on view until August 2^nd, was forced to close prematurely when the Museum closed as a precaution against Covid-19. Fast fashion is a global industry known for affordable apparel mass-produced for quick consumption that prompts consideration of labor practices, consumer culture, and sustainability among many other critical issues. Fast Fashion/Slow Art presents work from international contemporary artists and filmmakers addressing important issues connected to contemporary clothing production and distribution. It focuses on films and videos that document and reflect on this industry, and many of these are now available to watch in the online exhibition.

The online exhibition for Fast Fashion/Slow Art also reframes this discussion of the garment and fashion industry through new issues emerging from the global Covid-19 pandemic. Exhibition co-curators Bibiana Obler, associate professor of art history at the Corcoran School of Art and Design at George Washington University, and Phyllis Rosenzweig, curator emerita at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, share their thoughts on how the pandemic is impacting the fast fashion industry in a new introductory video. Several of the time-based works included in the exhibition can now be viewed in their entirety online. Other artists have contributed or made available new materials to provide new insights—sometimes quite literally!—into their work. Artist Cat Mazza and the Lattice20 Collective artist Remy Hunter, for instance, created a virtual reality view of Electroknit Dymaxion that provides an extraordinary way to experience the interior of this sculpture and its connections to the Dymaxion Map and source textile patterns.

Materials for at-home activities related to cross-stitching, knitting, and repurposing used garments are also included in the online exhibition. In some instances, these activities are directly related to the practices and artworks of participating artists, as in the case of Carole Frances Lung’s Frau Fiber vs. the Circular Sewing Machine of 2015. Others of these activities drew inspiration from programming held at the Museum earlier this year, including an artist workshop as well as a student knitting night held in collaboration with Bowdoin’s Office of Sustainability. This online exhibition is one of several newly created resources added to the Museum’s website during its temporary closure that offer ways of experiencing art from home. These materials are all housed on the Museum’s Visit From Home webpage—we encourage you to check this webpage often as we continue to update it with new resources connected to the Museum’s exhibitions and collection.

Fast Fashion/Slow Art was organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in cooperation with The George Washington University Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, and the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery.