When Jasper Johns said, “Take something. Do something to it. Do something else to it,” he might not have meant “Cut jeans into shorts.” Art and fashion, however, have long crossed paths, and their intersections continue to draw out the art world’s uneasy relationship to market culture and to the market’s overt commodification of art objects. Exploring recent collaborations and collisions between art and fashion, this panel of artists, designers, and writers will consider how online shopping, social media, performance, and legacies of craft have allowed them to push such boundaries, playing openly between the poles of outlandish luxury and debased realism. Panelists will include Antonio Blair, Cofounder of House of Ladosha; Eric Mack, artist; Mary Ping, fashion designer and Founder of the conceptual clothing and accessory label Slow and Steady Wins the Race; and Emily Spivack, author of Worn Stories (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014).

This event is organized on the occasion of “Cheryl Donegan: Scenes + Commercials,” an exhibition and a residency organized by the Department of Education and Public Engagement as part of its R&D Season: LEGACY, in which Donegan continues her exploration of the production and consumption of images in mass culture, middlebrow design, and art history. The exhibition presents works that span Donegan’s career, from the early ’90s to the present, tracing conceptual threads that run across her practice, including her interest in the mediated image, compressed space, and the mark’s indexical relation to the body. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the Resource Center will feature a major new installation by Donegan, titled “Concept Store,” that displays garments, drawings, prints, and textiles she has produced alongside items she has sourced from websites such as eBay. In this installation and the other works in “Scenes + Commercials,” the artist engages in a process of “refashioning the readymade” by alluding to longer histories of repurposing in both art and culture.