In conjunction with National Hispanic Heritage Month, “Second Skin,” a group exhibition featuring approximately 30 works from the 1950s to the present, will open at the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday and remain on view through Dec. 28.
With a strong emphasis on Latin America, the show has been curated by Estrellita B. Brodsky, a Latin American art scholar and founder of Another Space, a nonprofit curatorial initiative dedicated to presenting the work of Latin American and Latinx artists within a global context.
Featuring works by international artists and designers, “Second Skin” presents clothing as a powerful medium for articulating identity, expressing gender and cultural differences, and advancing political activism. It includes photography, sculpture, textiles, wearable objects, and archival material, including prints from Martine Gutierrez’s “Indigenous Woman,” a 128-page magazine from 2018 for which the artist acted as muse, model, photographer, stylist, editor, and art director.
“A fashion designer and hairstylist, the trans and Latinx artist contests the gender binary and false perceptions about cultural authenticity in lavish, multipage spreads,” according to the Museum of Modern Art, whose collection includes four self-portraits from “Indigenous Woman.” The artist herself has said, “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.”
“ ‘Second Skin’ expands the conversation around fashion by showing how garments operate in our daily lives. They protect us from the elements, they shape our identity, and represent a powerful cultural language,” said Christina M. Strassfield, the arts center’s executive director.
“It is an honor to partner with Southampton Arts Center and bring the spotlight to artists from Latin America within a global context,” said Ms. Brodsky. “The artists presented here reveal how fashion can convey social and political status, while also serving as a source of shared cultural memory and critical discourse.”
Ms. Brodsky conceived of “Second Skin” as a sequel to “Spin a Yarn,” a show she organized at Guild Hall in 2024. That exhibition, which examined the use of textiles as vehicles for the preservation of memories and knowledge, included fiber-based works from ancient Andean times to the present.
“Second Skin” is installed in three thematically curated galleries. The first highlights fashion as markers of identity, the second examines garments as protective devices, and the third considers clothing as consumer products within global markets. The galleries trace the multiple roles that clothes play in society.
Some of the artists featured in “Second Skin,” including Felix Baudry and Nazareth Pacheco, craft their own clothing to propose alternative identities or shields against political violence or sexual aggression. Others, such as Joiri Minaya and Stephanie Syjuco use commercially available ethnic patterns such as tropical prints to subvert racial and colonial thinking and criticize the fashion industry’s beauty standards and commodification of bodies.
Employing a forensic/documentary approach, other artists document the growth of clandestine camouflage and bulletproof garment workshops across Latin America to reflect on the region’s violent histories.
Moving beyond the notion of fashion as ornament or superficial decoration, the exhibition explores how fashion functions as a site where identities are constructed, commodified, resisted, and critically reclaimed.
Ms. Brodsky is a curator, collector, and philanthropist, internationally recognized for championing Latin American art on the global stage. Of Uruguayan and Venezuelan heritage, she has combined scholarly research with philanthropy to advance the visibility of artists from the region and its diaspora.
She earned her Ph.D. in art history from N.Y.U.’s Institute of Fine Arts, where her Ph.D. thesis, “Latin American Artists in Post-War Paris,” received the Association of Latin American Art’s award for best doctoral dissertation. She has curated exhibitions in Miami, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and in New York City at the Grey Art Gallery and the Americas Society.
In addition, she has established curatorial positions and initiatives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The participating artists in “Second Skin” are Felix Beaudry, Andrés Bedoya, Miguel Fernandez de Castro, Sylvie Fleury, Carole Frances Lung, Martine Gutierrez, Gaspar Libedinsky, Raúl de Nieves, Joiri Minaya, Nazareth Pacheco, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Stephanie Syjuco, Milagros de la Torre, WAR BOUTIQUE, and Andy Warhol, who is represented by 15 works on paper from the Jordan D. Schnitzer Collection.
A reception will be held on Oct. 11 from 5 to 7 p.m.
