J. Morgan Puett | Home | Press > Artist Statement

J. Morgan Puett. Born in Hahira, Georgia. Project artist; Site-sensitive. Recent recipient of The Anonymous Was A Woman Award and A Pew Charitable Trust Grant (PEI), and currently living and working between New York City and Beach Lake, Pa. My career and trajectory as an artist/cultural worker was shaped and determined very early. In 1984 I was attempting to research detailed aspects of working people's clothing from 1900-1930 in the costume archives of the Metropolitan Museum, and I was told that no specimens of these clothes survived. The actual reason for this was a shock to me – the clothes had been worn to dust, altered, patched, turned into quilts, chair backs, and curtains, passed down, and eventually used as rags. It was the fact that everything that was part of early vernacular culture was constantly being re-used, re-shaped, and re-worked – in a continuous act of invention that permanently shaped my practice. Categories shifted – clothing became furniture became architecture and vice versa – this changed my thinking about material culture and the inherent fluid nature of things. I realized that these histories and practices needed to not only be preserved and represented in museums but also activated in contemporary public life. At this moment I realized that I had to find a way to reconstruct historical practices and networks -- making products and systems that could activate all the categories of everyday life. Art alone, I found, is singularly lacking in the tools to do this. I strategically came to situate myself at the nexus of art, architecture and principally in the world of fashion. Fashion is a system that is used , negotiated, or imposed by every person on the planet — there is no more universal system of communication, experimentation, and social production than clothing. The recent history of fashion has affected our world — the industrial revolution, the global exploitation of labor, the expansion of capitalism and globalization — all of which have transformed our modes of dwelling, interaction and comportment in profoundly intimate manners. In my practice I situate fashion at the intersection of all of the debates embracing history, art, architecture, sociology, and economics, in a manner that allows me to respond to events in an immediate and democratic manner. It is through this debased, neglected, and assumed to be crass, medium of fashion that I have created an alternative territory. In doing so I began by refusing the false strategies of the illusions of the “not for profit” cultural sphere and opened a series of small clothing stores as critical projects (1985-2001). These became social spaces of collective investigation, experimentation, re-inscriptions of the history of labor, production, and social practices – an alternative form of gesamptkunstwerk situated directly in and for the world. Each project has investigated the past in order to re-evaluate the present from the perspective of a series of critical questions around labor, and identity – principally women’s labor and identity. When I launch into a project through textile, costume, and manufacturing , I attempt to re-invent these histories; thus, folding in the present with a consideration to the future. To invent the future one needs to develop new critical perspectives on the past – these must be constructed. I am not merely interested in recuperating hidden, lost, or misunderstood histories, but in the invention of what the future could look like. J. Morgan Puett