How Statement Pieces Bridges the Gap Between Art and Fashion

Statement Pieces pairs a 1520s Titian with a 2006 McQueen inside the Joslyn

The gap between the two works now sharing space at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha is roughly 480 years. On one side stands Tiziano Vecellio’s Portrait of a Man of the Cornaro Family with a Falcon, an oil on canvas from the late 1520s that the museum purchased in 1942. On the other hangs Alexander McQueen’s embroidered trapeze dress with ostrich feathers, The Widows of Culloden, from the autumn/winter 2006–7 collection. Statement Pieces: Art and Fashion is the first of its kind at the museum.

The exhibition bringing these two together, Statement Pieces: Art and Fashion, stages a dialogue between art and fashion in its Scott Pavilion Galleries S1–3, pairing dresses, overcoats, capes, and accessories with paintings, drawings, textiles, and photographs drawn from the museum’s own collection and from the Barrett Barrera Projects archive.

What the juxtaposition actually puts on the wall

The exhibition’s premise is simple to say and hard to pull off: clothes and artworks from across time and cultures, set against each other so that each changes how the other reads. The connections on view are described as formal, conceptual, novel, timeless, provocative, and profound — a wide range that suggests the pairings are meant to argue as much as admire.

The named highlights span five centuries of art and a century of fashion. On the art side: Titian, Maria van Oosterwyck, Andy Warhol, and Glenn Ligon. On the fashion side: Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Gucci, and Comme des Garçons. The contrast is built into the roster itself — a Venetian Renaissance portraitist next to a British designer who died in 2010, a Pop artist next to a house founded in the 1920s.

There is a quiet institutional contrast in the two pictured works, too. Titian’s canvas is a permanent holding — 42 3/4 × 38 inches, accessioned as 1942.3 and dedicated in 2007 in honor of Robert H. Ahmanson. McQueen’s dress, by comparison, travels on loan, courtesy of Barrett Barrera Projects, the independent arts organization and archive that co-organized the show and specializes in exhibitions combining art and fashion. One object the museum owns outright; the other it borrows.

Joslyn art museum snohetta plus alley poyner macchietto architecture

Who bears the stakes here

For Omaha visitors, the practical stake is access: this is the first time the Joslyn has mounted an exhibition of this specific art-meets-fashion kind, so the Scott Pavilion Galleries S1–3 become the only place in the city where a McQueen trapeze dress and a Titian portrait can be seen in the same walk.

What the materials do not yet say matters as much as what they do. The museum’s materials name the galleries, the artists, the designers, and the two pictured works, but they do not state the run dates, admission, or whether the show will travel. That question — how long this 480-year conversation stays up — remains open.

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