Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection

Yinka Shonibare Selects Works from the Permanent Collection
Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection is the fourth installation in the Nancy and Edwin Marks Gallery exhibition series devoted to the permanent collection.

Renowned British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE is the third guest curator in the series, and has focused in this exhibition on themes of travel and transportation as exemplified by collection objects ranging from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Shonibare has supplemented the exhibition by creating three-dimensional, life-sized sculptures of the Museum's founders, Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, wearing late Victorian-style dress fashioned from his signature contemporary pseudo-African batik textiles.

This playful juxtaposition visually provokes viewers and reinforces Shonibare's personal thesis on the nature of cultural dissemination.

The figures of the Hewitt sisters are placed on stilts, symbolizing, as Shonibare notes, their "superiority over their contemporaries in terms of their taste and adventurous spirit."

The diverse selection of objects is culled from Cooper-Hewitt's departments of Product Design and Decorative Arts; Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design; and Wallcoverings, as well as from the Library's rare book holdings.

On display are diaries kept by the Hewitt sisters during their international