The exhibition Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art includes a series of live events featuring artists who engage critically with fashion and costume through live and video-based performances.

On April 21, Garmenting artist Lexy Ho-Tai will present an immersive, experimental performance, Invitation to Monster. Invitation to Monster is a portal into an extrahuman space. Ho-Tai, alongside artists Jenny Hipscher and Nehemiah Luckett, will extend themselves through sculpture, movement, and sound to ask: What is monstrous in and around us? How can we play in the depths? When we welcome the scary, what is transformed? This performance will guide participants to the edges of body and collective. Loosen your human suits, all monsters welcome. 

This intimate, one-and-a-half hour engagement begins with interactive monster making on the Museum's seventh floor before proceeding to the gallery for the performance. There are a limited number of tickets available.

Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art is the first global survey to examine the use of clothing as a medium of visual art. By either making or altering clothing for expressive purposes, the 35 international artists in the exhibition create garments, sculpture, installation, and performance art that transforms dress into a critical tool for exploring issues of subjectivity, identity, and difference.

About the artists

Lexy Ho-Tai's multidisciplinary art and teaching practice explores imaginative and tangible world-building through craft and play. Working in a range of mediums, her collaborative and participatory work employs humor, imagination, and absurdity to invite viewers to contemplate pressing social and environmental issues. She believes that joy is an act of resistance, and that play forges a powerful space for audiences to envision and work towards alternative futures. A 2017 MAD Artist Fellow, Ho-Tai’s residencies also include the Watermill Center, Flux Factory, ARoS Museum, Everglades National Park, Art Farm, and Elsewhere Museum. Her work can be viewed at lexymakesthings.com. 

Jenny Hipscher is a theatre-maker, dancer, clown, facilitator, healing artist, cat-mama, auntie-next door, third generation in Brooklyn/Lenapehoking. After more than a decade living, working, and learning in the New Mexico desert, the mid-Missouri heartland, and Europe, she returned to her home borough for a Masters in Applied Theatre from CUNY School of Professional Studies. Jenny has devised, directed, performed, and bicycled across the United States as a core ensemble member of Agile Rascal Bicycle Touring Theatre since its founding in 2015. A licensed massage therapist for over fifteen years, her performance and bodywork practice feed each other, and reflect her belief in the interdependence of personal and cultural healing.

Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, and now a resident of New York City, Nehemiah Luckett has been creating music for more than 30 years. From an early age, he connected his deep love of music to the transformative power of building community through breathing and singing with family and friends. He is a freelance composer, performer, teacher, and music director. Current projects include composing an afro-futurist, queer, Bible-based opera, Jonathan and David, and two new musicals: A Burning Church with collaborators Zhailon Levingston and Alex Hare and Triple Threats with Tracy Conyer Lee. 

Accessibility

All levels of the Museum are accessible by elevator. The event will begin on the floor 7 with monster making. There will be tables and chairs with backs available. We will move to the floor 4 after 30 minutes. During the performance, the audience will be seated in backed chairs. There will be optional invitations for gentle movement throughout the evening, which can be done seated. ADA compliant bathrooms are accessible on the Floor 6 and the ground level. If you have any questions or additional access needs, please email lydia.brawner@madmuseum.org. 

Image: Shadow Monster, 2021 Self-Portrait by Lexy Ho-Tai