de Young Museum, San Francisco
on display until April 24, 2022
Post was written by Sequoia Barnes
My first introduction to Patrick Kelly was at the first iteration of Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2014. I was a fashion studies graduate student preparing to be interviewed about becoming an intern for the Costume and Textiles Department. Back then, I thought I wanted to be a curator of fashion. While I waited, I wandered around Runway of Love. It was a feast for my eyes, world-changing even. I had been formally trained as an artist, with a brain for art history. Patrick Kelly had somehow managed to combine my two favorite things, art, and fashion, in the most radical yet endearing way—harnessing the uncanny valley and bending it to his design prowess. I thought of Betye Saar. I thought of Robert Colescott. I thought of Faith Ringgold. I thought of Nick Cave, Glen Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker. Here was another unsung (at the time) figure of black radical art practice. I had so many questions. How did he get the courage to leave Mississippi? How did he get the courage, the audacity to make the golliwog his signature? What was it like for him to be a southern, black queer man in Paris, in a world that sought to oppress and crush him on a global scale? Yet there he was, succeeding far beyond anyone’s expectations? What was it like to be so clever, I thought.
The de Young Museum’s Runway of Love, a remaking of that moment that changed my world all those years ago, brings Kelly back to the West Coast, where his impact was all but forgotten. The exhibition also adds to Kelly’s growing popularity since the first Runway of Love; the greater fashion population is finally noticing his contributions to fashion. The exhibition is a multi-sensory experience that features not only Kelly’s designs but also projections of his runway shows, displays of his collages, and the various black dolls he collected—including the vehemently racist mammy and golliwog dolls that he reappropriated and subverted through his designs.
I contributed to the exhibition by helping to visualize Kelly’s intersectional existence and help visitors learn about his use of racist objects in his work, assisting with the visual interpretation of his work in the exhibition and contributing to the catalog and public programming of Runway of Love. I did not attempt to understand why someone black would use, let alone collect such things; that is not a question I can answer because I am not Patrick Kelly. Yet I wanted visitors to understand how artists reappropriate racist ephemera, one tool among many that Black creatives have used to confront the brutality of racism. Richard Powell has most recently explored Black artists “going there” in his book aptly titled Going There Black Visual Satire (2020), examining black diasporic artists that have the audacity to make us all uncomfortable by refusing to hide the stains on our so-called “modern,” “civilized” world. Yes, Patrick Kelly was a fun-loving spirit who seemed to enchant everyone he met. His designs brought out the mischief of camp and kitsch, a growing aesthetic strategy amongst queer designers of the time, including Franco Moschino and Jean Paul Gaultier. However, Runway of Love shows that there was so much more to Patrick Kelly and his work than the seemingly light-hearted pleasure of buttons and bows.
Dr. Sequoia Barnes is a textile/mixed media artist and visual culture scholar based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was the advising scholar for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s presentation of Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love.
Works Cited:
Powell, Richard J. Going There: Black Visual Satire. Yale University Press, 2020.
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