In conjunction with its current exhibition, “Second Skin,” which explores the intersection between art and fashion, the Southampton Arts Center will host a “fashion intervention” performance by Gabriela Galván, an artist based in Brooklyn, on Saturday between noon and 5 p.m.
Ms. Galván will restage and adapt her project “Fashion Interventions at the Street (Summer),” which has been presented intermittently in SoHo since 2007.
“The installation allowed me to work using the city as a studio of intense and open interaction with the people,” the artist has said on her website. She will do the same at the arts center, inviting guests to bring in either garments they consider worn out or those ready to be discarded, and see them reimagined through spontaneous sculptural intervention.
After the performance, from 5 to 7, guests will be offered complimentary cocktails and hot chocolate and an opportunity to engage with the artists and Estrellita Brodsky, a Latin American art scholar and the show’s curator.
“ ‘Second Skin’ expands the conversation around fashion by showing how garments operate in our daily lives,” said Christina M. Strassfield, the arts center’s executive director. “They protect us from the elements, they shape our identity, and represent a powerful cultural language.”
“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,” according to Ms. Brodsky.
The exhibition 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 craft their own clothing to propose alternative identities or shields against political violence or sexual aggression. Others 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. Other artists document the growth of clandestine camouflage and bulletproof garment workshops across Latin America to reflect on the region’s violent histories.
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 has curated exhibitions in Miami, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and in New York City at the Grey Art Gallery and the Americas Society.
She 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.
The arts center’s regular hours are Friday through Sunday from noon to 5, but next week it will be open during those hours on Monday and Tuesday as well. Admission is always free.
