For the next year, The Museum Body will reside in the Carter’s first-floor sloping gallery, which Jean feels is similar to a “portal” through sectors of time.
“[The sloping gallery] is very much a passageway between taking the buildings of different entities,” says Shin. “I think of a passageway between history and the contemporary. But in between that space, how does that all work? It’s the people who work at the museums and the staff make that experience possible. It's not just architecture, it's not just funding for capital campaigns. The things that really matter are the people who can bridge many agendas, many spaces and many visions together.”
The Museum Body coincides with the 20th anniversary of Shin’s first exhibition — Projects 81 — at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Like The Museum Body, Projects 81 also displayed old textiles, fabrics and garments. Over the past two decades, workplace culture has become an international conversation, which inspired Shin to reimagine her exhibition for the Carter.
Maggie Adler, the Carter’s curator, first came across Shin’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the city where Adler began her art career. Adler knew she wanted to work with Shin in some capacity.
Jean Shin, who has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York City, unveils an exhibition in Fort Worth.
Joseph Hu
“Jean and I arrived at this over many conversations, like, ‘OK, this space feels really important, because it sets the tone for how people engage with the museum,’” says Adler. “We are in a city with other museums that are very classy and polished, and we wanted to show that we could be experimental.”
To accumulate the clothing, Adler wrote a staff-wide email, asking the museum’s team to donate clothing they consider their “work uniform,” noting, “You’re not gonna get it back.”
Through the sloping gallery, beholders will see colorful arrangements of shirts, jeans, aprons and coveralls on the wall, as connecting scarves and fabrics hang from the ceiling.
“Clothing is incredibly accessible material,” says Shin. “Most people don't need an art history degree, or need to know what a registrar or curator is to know — it’s clothing. And it's connected to a cultural identity, how we fashion ourselves is a generational thing. It changes, it comes back. Fashion itself is a hot topic to discuss — clothing, fast fashion, unsustainable qualities of waste produced in fashion runways, and so on.”
At the end of the exhibition, viewers will see Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ "Diana" sculpture, in the likeness of the namesake goddess. In the famed sculpture, Diana is depicted completely nude.
Office Space
“I think there's an irony to what Jean has done,” says Adler, “which is fill an entire gallery with clothing. At the endpoint, you’ve got the goddess who doesn't have any clothing on, so there's a kind of an unanticipated connection with the historical collection between Jean’s work and the nudity of the goddess.”Shin believes that much of the clothing serves as a time capsule representing various chapters of each staff member’s life. Such examples include COVID-era T-shirts urging people to keep a six-foot distance with others, or shirts from past concerts, or the obvious T-shirt reading “Staff.”
But the Carter has always emphasized individuality, and visitors will see this when beholding The Museum Body. In addition to the abundance of colorful, vibrant garments, Shin hopes that the exhibition will lend perspective to just how much work goes into producing the experience of museum-going.
“These are materials that are here to position someone to understand that you're actually entering a workspace,” says Shin. “The whole museum experience, you might see a guard, but behind that guard is a whole department of security. And behind that, there’s a lighting department, there’s the operations. There's a whole infrastructure behind that experience of walking into this space. People might take a day off and go to a museum. Well, for these people, their day job is working and providing this experience. So it really flips people's experiences, about understanding the space.”
The Museum Body is on view until June 30, 2025, at the Amon Carter Museum, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth.
