The Swan (After Norman Parkinson Foundation), 2017
Oil and Acrylic on canvas, 86 5/8 X 66 7/8 in.
The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Gift of Barbara '68 and Theodore '68 Alfond, 2017.6.58.
© Paulina Olowska
Portrait of a Lady, Ca. 1620s
Oil on canvas, 34 X 35 in.
Gift of the Myers Family, Mr. and Mrs. John C. Myers, Jr. '42 and June Reinhold Myers '41, 1961.3
Do clothes really make the man (or the woman)? Perhaps not, but fashion choices can tell us something about the people who do the choosing. Among the works to be displayed at Manners of Dress will be The Swan (after Norman Parkinson Foundation) by Paulina Olowska and Portrait of a Lady, attributed to Paulus Moreelse.
In Mark Twain’s 1905 short story “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” he posited the following: “[One] realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing. There is no power without clothes.”
Really? Guess we’d better be more judicious with our wardrobe choices and make certain to look sharp when we visit Manners of Dress, which will open on Saturday, September 13, at the Rollins Museum of Art. The exhibition will provide a deeper look at what fashion choices might indicate beyond adornment or self-expression.
“It’s about more than the person wearing those items,” says Gisela Carbonell, the museum’s curator. “There might be cultural and political implications. There might be economic underpinnings. There might be regional traditions and preservation of heritage. There are different contexts and lenses through which we can look at these works.”
Manners of Dress, therefore, will encompass a robust selection of paintings, sculptures and photographs from European, American, Indigenous, Cuban, Dominican and Mexican artists. Traditional works by Paulus Moreelse, Dirck Hals, Frans Pourbus the Younger and Luis Zapico will illustrate the importance of textures, materials and styles in visual communication.
Contemporary works by Elinor Carucci, Caitlin Keogh and Paulina Olowska will explore how what we wear can become a visual signifier of status and identity.
There’ll also be a slew of watch keys. Yes, the museum has a collection of more than 1,000 of these little winders—dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries—that were donated by a former college trustee and his wife in the 1940s. While such devices had an obvious practical function when all watches were mechanical, they also became fashionable in and of themselves.
“Many of the works in the show depict sitters wearing different kinds of accessories, and so this is an opportunity to see accessories as part of the exhibition,” says Carbonell. “We have a selection of watch keys on view because we haven’t shown them in many, many years. It’s a unique and interesting collection—and they’re beautiful.”
Carbonell will offer tours of Manners of Dress, one in English on Friday, September 19, at 11 a.m., and another in Spanish on Tuesday, September 23, at 6 p.m. There are also docent-led tours on Saturdays or you can just stop in—admission to the museum is free—and take it all in for yourself.
The Rollins Museum of Art is located at 1000 Holt Avenue on the campus of Rollins College, Winter Park. For more information, call 407.646.2526 or visit rollins.edu/rma.
