Dallas is a long way from New York, and traditional African societies are a long stretch from hatmaker Stephen Jones. But exhibitions of both — African Headwear: Beyond Fashion at the Dallas Museum of Art and Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones at the Bard Graduate Center in New York — show that visual sense may carry over from one place to another fairly frequently.
Just take a look at the four pictures, featuring two hats from each, running down the sides of this post. There’s probably no direct connection, but still…
The Dallas exhibit has been on view since August 14 and it runs through January 1. It has, according to the museum’s press release, about forty objects borrowed from collectors and drawn from its permanent collection of African art, which it calls “internationally acclaimed as one of the top five of its kind in the United States,” a claim that’s new to me. The show explores headwear as a signifier of status. The use of materials figures into that, and the hats on view are made of unusual materials like the skin from a spiny anteater, as well as wood, copper, nutshells, lion mane, human hair, glass beads, plastic buttons, and ostrich feathers.
At Bard, Hats: An Anthology opens on Sept. 15 and runs to April 15, 2012. A collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, milliner Jones chose more than 250 hats ranging from a twelfth-century Egyptian fez to a 1950s Balenciaga hat and couture creations by Jones and his contemporaries. And range they do, to “motorcycle helmets, turbans, berets,… a child’s plastic tiara…. hats worn by celebrities such as Madonna and Keira Knightley….loans particularly relevant to the United States, including Babe Ruth’s baseball cap and the top hat worn by President Franklin Roosevelt to his fourth inauguration.”
The exhibits are organized differently — in Dallas, there are sections on professional headwear, men’s and women’s headwear and headwear for chiefs and kings.
At Bard, Jones split the show into Inspiration, The Creation, The Salon and The Client.
That display a difference, I think, between a scholarly didactic view of a subject and a more popular one, even though the Bard show has a “book” — I notice they do not call it a catalogue on the website — and the DMA show does not.
Mostly, what it probably shows is a difference in budget.
All the same, I’d like to see them both.