Dress Up, Speak Up: Regalia and Resistance

Through striking adornments and performative acts, Dress Up, Speak Up: Regalia and Resistance explores how artists reclaim identity, challenge history, and transform cultural narratives to confront contemporary social, political, and personal complexities.

Bedecked and bejeweled, the figures populating Dress Up, Speak Up occupy fluid space and time, evoking past and present, fact and fiction, memory and desire, to illuminate the complexity of contemporary identity. Whether clad in the stylized garb of Enlightenment-era Europe, the traditional coverings of ancient religious tradition, or the gender-bending bling of popular culture, these representations of self and other role-play in real time, reach back through history to address prevailing personal, social, and political challenges. From Ebony G. Patterson’s families, dancers, gangstas, and deceased, to portraits derived from allegory, autobiography, and the art canon by Titus Kaphar, Firelei Báez, Berni Searle, Vivek Vilasini, Fahamu Pecou, and others, this pantheon of provocative and prophetic personages are adorned to confront, transform, and redefine cultural visibility.