“Audacious” WOW exhibition a huge hit in Seattle

MEDIA RELEASE

20 February 2017

“Audacious” WOW exhibition a huge hit in Seattle, now open on US East Coast

On the back of an unprecedented 250,000 visitors to Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, the international World of WearableArt (WOW) exhibition has opened at the prestigious North American museum – Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum (PEM). Salem is the historic and and vibrant coastal tourism city near Boston.

PEM is one of the largest and most dynamic art museums in the United States, with an endowment of more than US $400 million and attendances across America in excess of 250,000 a year. The Museum is currently undergoing major physical expansion and when the new wing opens in 2019, PEM will rank among the US’s top 20 largest art museums.

The Museum's mission is to celebrate outstanding artistic and cultural creativity in ways that transform people's lives. The WOW exhibition follows the international touring Victoria & Albert Museum Shoes: Pleasure and Pain and will run from February 18 through June 11. Previous design/fashion exhibitions at Peabody-Essex have included a celebration of the stylist Iris Apfel, and Future Beauty: Avant-Garde Japanese Fashion featuring Japanese fashion designers Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto.

WOW CEO Gisella Carr says the World of WearableArt exhibition’s huge success over the last six months at Seattle’s MoPOP, and the interest of an institution such as Peabody Essex is very gratifying.

“Many thousands of New Zealanders love WOW, of course, and we are really delighted by the way American museums and their audiences are responding in the same way – it is really catching fire over there,” says Carr. “The New Zealand competition attracts outstanding wearable art designers from across world. This exhibition showcases their work internationally at a level of quality and craftsmanship that is eye-opening for audiences. The idea of wearable art –using the body as the canvas – is surprising to people; it makes them think and marvel at the designers’ ideas and the execution their designs.”

MoPOP’s Curator of Education and Interpretive Services Bonnie Showers agrees wearable art is a new concept for museum visitors and has been a real drawcard.

“We had record numbers at MoPOP and a huge heartwarming response to WOW here,” says Showers.” Even our hardcore science fiction fans have delighted in the pure, over-the-top imagination and extraordinary artistry represented through the WOW exhibit. It was common to hear, ‘This is our favourite exhibit that you have had at MoPOP.’ In this context WOW spoke to both past and future worlds of fantasy and science fiction with boundless originality that is truly inspiring.”

Described by Lynda Hartigan, PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Deputy Director and curator, as “audacious in its mingling of concepts,” the WOW exhibition showcases 32 award-winning WOW garments including a 17th Century wooden ball gown made by an Alaskan carpenter, a New Zealand-made goddess in a suit of armour by a blacksmith who started his art at age 14, and an ethereal skeleton by a Chinese design student.

“I love the egalitarian nature of the WOW competition - encouraging fresh perspectives and different types of creativity to intersect and bloom,” says Hartigan. “The artists push the limits of what you can do as clothing and how design can fundamentally alter the human form.

“It’s exhilarating to see skill sets and design logic from disparate fields activated to create these unique moments of surprise and delight that are revelatory for lovers of design and fashion alike.”

WOW’s founding Director Dame Suzie Moncrieff who heads the creative team and curated the exhibition says she is very pleased with the response the exhibition continuously receives.

“The fact that people from all walks of life and at all stages of life can design and make wearable art helps our touring exhibition be accessible,” Dame Suzie says. “In this way WOW is interesting and inspiring to the wide range of people who visit museums and galleries around the world. As well as lovers of art, design and fashion, we also hope we are inspiring a number of future wearable art designers.”

About The World of WearableArt (WOW)

One of New Zealand’s cultural success stories is the spectacular World of WearableArt (WOW) created by Dame Suzie Moncrieff in 1987. The World of WOW is alive 12-months of the year. It centres around an annual global wearable art design competition as well as a spectacular annual theatrical season in Wellington, year-round exhibitions at the National WOW Museum in Nelson and a travelling international exhibition, currently in North America.

The Competition

At the core of WOW is an international design competition that attracts entries from all over the world. The range of garments produced for each year’s WOW competition is simply breathtaking, as the rules of competition mean that anything that is in any way wearable can find a place on stage, as long as it is original, beautifully designed and well-made. This also results in garments that are constructed from an extraordinary array of materials, pushing the boundaries of expectation. The competition attracts a wide range of designers, including professional designers, students, specialists in a specific material such as wood, metal, fiberglass who apply it in the context of wearable art, and many individuals who simply have a great idea and the energy and skill to execute it.

The Show

Every September and October, the WOW Show bursts into new life, taking over New Zealand’s vibrant capital city of Wellington in an explosion of creativity and fun. Brought to life by around 350 cast and crew, the three-week season of 15 shows is completely different every year and attracts 58,000 people whose passion has built it into New Zealand’s single largest theatrical event. The show is now in its 29th year, with the 2017 show season running 21 September to 8 October, with tickets going on sale from 1 March.

The Exhibitions

Each year, more than 40,000 people visit the National WOW Museum on Cadillac Way in Nelson to see up close and personal the winning WOW designs from the most recent competition, as well as seasonal exhibitions celebrating the work on some of WOW’s most prolific and successful designers.

WOW’s travelling international exhibition has been touring since November 2014, including to Australia, Hawaii, Seattle and now Salem (near Boston). After Salem it will go to Mexico and St Petersburg. The exhibition features three distinct sections: a display of 32 garments from the permanent World of WearableArt collection including winners from the past 12 years; a workroom for visitors to design their own piece of wearable art; and moving image material that shows the garments in their performance context at the annual WOW show in Wellington.

Exhibition highlights include:

• Gothic Habit worn shoulder to knee, a three-dimensional replica of a Gothic cathedral, by American designer Lynn Christiansen.
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• Persephone’s Descent, a suit of armor made by Stuart Johnson, a New Zealand blacksmith and weapons maker for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.
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• Born to Die, a dress made completely of cable ties woven into a sculptural “vertebrae” to look like a fish skeleton, by design student, Guo Xia Tong from China.
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• Lady of the Wood, a replica of a 17th-century ball gown made entirely of mahogany, lacewood, maple, and cedar, by Alaskan carpenter David Walker
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• Ornitho-Maia, a complex and ornately carved and embossed leather gown inspired by the ethereal protector of birds designed by Nadine Jäggi, New Zealand costume designer for films including Avatar, The Hobbit, and Prince Caspian.
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• A special display of “bizarre” bras made of unconventional materials including kitchen utensils, a taxidermied hedgehog; and aBRAcaplyse Now”, which heralds the Mayan end of days and the civilization’s ancestral iguana God.

MoPOP Tripadvisor reviews include comments such as ….

“The highlight of the entire place, for us, was the "World of Wearable Art" show, which showcased 32 amazing, wearable art pieces from artists around the world, each one unique, astoundingly creative & interesting, some made from recycled materials. We had no idea this is a global phenomena, & highly regarded, but it was wonderful.”

“The WOW exhibit upstairs was well worth seeing as well (wearable art on the scale of Lady Gaga).”

“The wearable art was surreal and amazing.”

“The wearable art exhibit is unbelievable. If you are into style or design or art or the movies or just want to see what very imaginative minds can create this exhibit is a must see! We were not expecting anything like this from MOPOP. It was absolutely the best part of the museum though many sections are also good to see. I hope they continue bringing in the wearable art every year or have exhibits similar to this in future.”

“For me, the best part of this museum is the wearable art exhibit on the second floor. It was amazing and so interesting.”

“…the Wearable Art exhibit which blew our minds!”

More About Peabody Essex Museum (PEM)

Over the last 20 years, PEM has distinguished itself as one of the fastest-growing art museums in North America. Founded in 1799, it is also the country’s oldest continuously operating museum. At its heart is a mission to enrich and transform people's lives by broadening their perspectives, attitudes and knowledge of themselves and the wider world. PEM celebrates outstanding artistic and cultural creativity through exhibitions, programming and special events that emphasize cross-cultural connections, integrate past and present and underscore the vital importance of creative expression.

The museum's collection is among the finest of its kind boasting superlative works from around the globe and across time -- including American art and architecture, Asian export art, photography, maritime art and history, Native American, Oceanic and African art.

PEM's campus affords a varied and unique visitor experience with hands-on creativity zones, interactive opportunities and performance spaces. Twenty-four noted historic structures grace PEM’s campus, including Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese house that is the only such example of Chinese domestic architecture on display in the United States, and the Phillips Library, which holds one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts.

PEM Fashion Initiative

World of WearableArt is the most recent offering from PEM’s fashion initiative, undertaken as the next chapter for one of the country’s leading collections of historic costumes and textiles from around the world. PEM’s fashion initiative began in 2009 with Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel, followed by Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones (2012), Future Beauty: Avant-Garde Japanese Fashion (2013), Native Fashion Now (2015) and the Victoria and Albert Museum touring exhibition Shoes: Pleasure and Pain (2016-17). Concurrently, the museum has made, and continues to make, major acquisitions of 20th and 21st-century fashion.

PEM Exhibition Credit

World of WearableArt is presented in partnership with the New Zealand government. Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation provided generous support. The East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum also provided support.

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