Second Skin
January 22 – May 18, 2026
Antonio
Antonio Lopez
(b. 1943, Utuado, Puerto Rico – d. 1987, New York, NY)
Juan Ramos
(b. 1942, Caguas, Puerto Rico – d. 1995, New York, NY)
Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos—known collectively as Antonio—reshaped fashion imagery in the 1970s and 1980s, merging illustration, photography, textile design, and shoe design into a single creative vision. Their work treated fashion not only as clothing or style, but also as a system of images, social networks, and cultural influence.
In photographs, sketches, and collaborations with magazines including Vogue and Interview, Antonio captured the ways in which desire, visibility, and commerce intersect. Instamatic snapshots of friends, models, and celebrities capture intimate, rapid sequences that bring their social world into the frame, while drawings of shoe designs explore form, function, and aesthetic possibility. Their work with Interview magazine—where they designed layouts, conceptualized features, and even appeared on covers—placed them at the center of a media network that circulated beauty, celebrity, and aspiration.
Through these works, Antonio demonstrated how fashion operates as a site where identities are constructed, circulated, and consumed. Shoes, sketches, and snapshots were not just objects or images, but tools to intervene in culture, collapsing the line between personal expression and mass media. Together, they reveal fashion as both a commercial system and a space for reinvention, showing how creativity, celebrity, and desire are intertwined in the production of consumer culture.
Felix Beaudry (b. 1996, Berkeley, CA)
Felix Beaudry creates soft sculptures that resist fixed notions of the body and its presentation. His sagging, formless figures—often imagined as giants with dislocated limbs—function as wearable skins, where fabric becomes both shelter and second body. Working through humor and distortion, Beaudry points to the instability of gendered ideals and the absurdity of clothing as a marker of identity. His torso works, for example, exaggerate the muscular male physique only to collapse it when worn, transforming celebration into parody. Through these pliable forms, Beaudry explores the vulnerability, fluidity, and ambiguity embedded in lived experience.
Andrés Bedoya (b. 1978, La Paz, Bolivia)
Andrés Bedoya’s practice weaves together histories of the Andean region, drawing on pre-Columbian metallurgy, Catholic ritual, folklore, and contemporary cultural memory. His semiabstract objects recall clothing, armor, and ritual dress, evoking the body as both vessel and site of meaning. Working with materials ranging from organic matter such as fruit peels and hair to traditional silversmithing techniques, Bedoya explores themes of fragility, loss, and collective ritual. By reconstructing layered traditions into new material forms, his work meditates on the interdependence between individual and collective identity, where acts of making become carriers of resilience, memory, and transformation.
Miguel Fernández de Castro (b. 1986, Sonora, Mexico)
Miguel Fernández de Castro is a visual artist and activist based in Altar, a small town in the Sonoran Desert, about 60 miles south of the U.S.–Mexico border. Trained in photography, his practice investigates how the Arizona–Sonora borderlands have been reshaped by organized crime, migration economies, and illegal mining operations.
The shoes and photograph on view form part of Fernández de Castro’s ongoing investigation into migration and the informal textile workshops around Altar. Central to the local economy, these talleres produce camouflage garments and shoes designed to help migrants evade border patrol. Made from military fabrics with discarded carpet fragments affixed to their soles, the alpargatas are engineered to leave minimal or no footprints. Their patterns, adapted to blend with the Sonoran desert’s muted palette shown in the photograph, have shifted over time, reflecting the toll of drought, overgrazing, and mining on the landscape.
Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA)
In Indigenous Woman (2018), a 124-page artist’s book, Martine Gutierrez appropriates the format and style of a fashion magazine’s September issue, traditionally its most anticipated and robust edition. The artist draws on the glossy visual vocabulary of fashion advertising to craft imaginary campaigns for shoes, perfume, jeans, sunglasses, and other luxury products, in which Martine adopts every role: muse, model, photographer, stylist, editor, and art director. For Martine, adopting the visual language of advertising serves as a tool to question the performative nature of mainstream femininity, as well as the media’s obsession with celebrity. At once seductive and subversive, Indigenous Woman appears as a high-fashion magazine but unfolds a meditation on self-determination, fluid gender identity, and cultural construction. One of the artist’s most widely exhibited projects to date, the publication nods to Warhol’s Interview magazine in both its oversize format and its ironic, playful exploration of notions of identity, sexuality and celebrity.
Tim Hawkinson ( b. 1960, San Franciso, CA)
Born in San Francisco in 1960, Tim Hawkinson studied at San José State University and earned his MFA from UCLA in 1989. Hawkinson’s artistic practice spans sculpture, photography, and installation, though he is particularly known for his works that incorporate sound and movement. Employing quotidian and often abject materials—including elements derived from his own body—he interrogates the boundaries between the organic and the mechanical, the intimate and the universal. His practice is grounded in processes of transformation, through which familiar forms are estranged and reconfigured into complex, often uncanny objects. His work, Shoes (1993) exemplifies this approach. Made with yellow shoes encased in plaster in a red shoe box, the work is presented in an abstract manner, evoking both organic and mechanical associations. Through this unsettling yet meticulous composition, Hawkinson invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between self and object.
Frida Kahlo (b. 1907, Mexico City, Mexico – d. 1954)
Frida Kahlo is renowned for her striking and deeply personal body of work, particularly her self-portraits, which explore identity, pain, gender, and postcolonial experience. Between 1926—when she began painting while recovering from a near-fatal bus accident—and her death in 1954 at age 47, Kahlo produced approximately 66 self-portraits alongside still lifes and portraits of those close to her. As she stated, “I paint my own reality,” using her image as both subject and means of investigation. Her works function simultaneously as expressions of lived experience and as deliberate constructions of selfhood. Central to this self-fashioning was her use of traditional indigenous dress, especially the Otomí huipil blouse. Kahlo adopted this attire as a powerful visual and political statement, signaling anti-colonial resistance, Indigenous Mexican culture, and female strength.
Gaspar Libedinsky (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
In the group of works titled as Míster Trapo (2010), Gaspar Libedinsky transforms cleaning rags into garments including suits, cardigans, and sportswear. Reflecting on Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis when unemployment forced many into informal labor, Libedinsky transforms materials tied to domestic work into the realm of fashion. The artist highlights the labor embedded in textiles and blurs the line between working uniforms and couture. His process reconsiders the divisions between utility and luxury. By turning ordinary objects into apparel, Libedinsky critiques consumer culture while showing how scarcity can generate new forms of creativity and self-presentation.
Lucretia Lionti (b. 1985, Tucumán, Argentina)
Lucrecia Lionti is a multi-disciplinary artist whose hand knit wool sweater Infinito % is immediately recognizable as an oversized replica of the jersey worn by renowned Argentine soccer player Lionel Messi. While paying homage to the craftsmanship and local resources of Argentina’s faltering wool-based economy, Lionti draws parallels between issues of identity and inflated celebrityhood. The pink jersey worn by Messi, now playing for Inter Miami, further symbolizes his more recent allegiance to the Miami team in place of earlier ones worn when playing for Barcelona, Paris Saint Germain, and during the World Cup win for his native Argentina. While the superstar captains both Argentina’s national team as well as the US based Inter Miami, the sold-out souvenir shirt denotes the commercialization of sports as well as its globalization, and the ease of changing loyalties as easily as changing jerseys.
Carole Frances Lung (b. 1966, San Francisco, California)
Carole Frances Lung performs as Frau Fiber, an East German garment worker whose durational actions confront the systems behind contemporary fast-fashion apparel production. In Frau Fiber vs. The Ring Spinner (2016), the artist sits at a ring-spinning wool machine on a quiet factory floor, attempting to spin yarn at the same pace as the automated equipment. The video records the stark contrast between 150 yards of hand-spun yarn and over 10,000 yards produced by the machine, dramatizing the pressures of industrial speed and the displacement of human labor.
As part of a series of performances inspired by the folklore of John Henry, Frau Fiber spins yarn by hand alongside contemporary textile machinery, exposing the disparity in production between manual labor and mechanized processes. This ‘competition’ against the machine also emphasizes the histories of labor, mechanization, and overproduction. Across workshops, public demonstrations, and Sewing Rebellion events, Frau Fiber teaches participants to repair and create garments, connecting audiences to the skills, time, and care that fast fashion often erases. Through these acts, the artist highlights the human and environmental cost of mass-produced clothing while framing sewing, mending, and making as strategies of resistance, skill, and empowerment.
Joiri Minaya (b. 1990, New York City, New York)
Joiri Minaya examines how Caribbean identity has been commodified and exoticized through recurring tropical motifs. Drawing on floral prints, botanical illustrations, and tourist imagery, she collects and re-stages fabrics and garments—particularly Hawaiian shirts and spandex bodysuits—to expose the colonial legacies embedded in such representations. In her series I Can Wear Tropical Print Now (2018), Minaya alters secondhand tropical shirts, inserting images of ships and military vessels that disrupt their idyllic patterns. In the photographic series Containers (2015–20), she poses in patterned bodysuits sewn into the shapes of stereotypical “Dominican women” poses sourced from Google, situating herself in man-made landscapes that mimic natural environments. Across these works, Minaya reveals how repetition produces stereotype while also reclaiming pattern as a tool for critique, camouflage, and resistance.
Vik Muniz (b. 1961, São Paolo Brazil)
Vik Muniz is renowned for his innovative use of unconventional materials to create intricate, conceptually layered works that challenge traditional ideas of medium and perception. In Untitled (Dress) (1992), Muniz presents an elongated version of a child’s baptismal gown. By extending the garment beyond its natural proportions, he symbolically suggests the persistence of spiritual purity, innocence, and a state of grace beyond childhood into adulthood. The work transforms a familiar ceremonial object into a reflection on the tension between idealized innocence and the realities of human development.
Nazareth Pacheco (b. 1961, São Paulo, Brazil)
For more than three decades, Nazareth Pacheco has created objects rooted in the intimate history of her own body, transforming personal experience into sculptural reflection on violence, desire, and vulnerability. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Pacheco strips her works of expressive gesture, instead producing meticulously crafted objects that are both alluring and unsettling. Using materials such as surgical steel, razor blades, glass, crystals, and domestic tools, she fashions objects that recall jewelry or protective devices, reframing the body as a contested site of beauty and harm. In confronting themes of sexuality and trauma, Pacheco’s work resists sentimentality, offering instead a stark meditation on how ornament can simultaneously embellish and endanger.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador)
Ronny Quevedo is a Bronx-based artist whose practice reworks abstraction, collage, and sports imagery to examine identity through migration and cultural inheritance. Drawing on his Ecuadorian background—his father’s history in soccer and his mother’s work in dressmaking—he bridges vernacular and formal visual languages. In body and soul, Quevedo references the abstract systems embedded in textiles, overlaying gold foil onto dressmaking patterns to evoke both the mapped body and the labor that shapes it. The work stages a tension between visibility and erasure, luxury and unseen craft.
Bárbara Sánchez-Kane (b. 1987, Merida, Mexico)
Bárbara Sánchez-Kane creates sculptures and garments that examine how clothing enforces cultural norms and shapes identity. Using patternmaking, molding, and tailoring, she dismantles garments and rebuilds them into forms that mix masculine and feminine elements. This process demonstrates how fashion carries ideas about discipline, gender, and power. Works such as How to Sell Goods (2023) and Folding Materials Over a Body (2023) use found materials and discarded clothes to question who fashion includes and excludes. By taking apart and recombining these objects, Sánchez-Kane shows how the same systems that regulate bodies can also be used for critique and self-definition. Her work resists the uniformity of fashion trends, insisting on clothing as expression and change rather than conformity.
Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines)
Stephanie Syjuco’s Cargo Cults (2018) reimagines ethnographic portraiture through photographs of friends and collaborators wearing ostensible luxury goods. Posed against lush, staged backdrops, the figures recall colonial-era images of “native” subjects while their clothing blurs the boundary between authenticity and imitation. By combining the languages of anthropology and consumer culture, Syjuco exposes how race, labor, and commerce shape systems of value and cultural identity. Her restaging of the ethnographic gaze underscores how images circulate to construct “otherness,” and reconsiders who produces style, who consumes it, and how power is inscribed on the body.
Milagros de la Torre (b. 1965, Lima, Peru)
Milagros de la Torre’s photographic practice explores the afterlives of trauma through objects that embody both vulnerability and resilience. Her Bulletproof series (2008) depicts life-sized everyday garments designed to be bulletproof by Colombian designer Miguel Caballero, often called the “Armani of armored fashion.” Suspended against the stark white backgrounds and printed on cotton paper, the garments appear at once ordinary and spectral, their absent wearers only implied. While these protective clothes are commonly used by politicians, business elites, and anonymous citizens, they also reflect the normalization of fear and militarization in daily life. De la Torre’s work exposes the paradox of fashion as both shield and signifier, where garments promise safety even as they materialize violence, secrecy, and power.
WAR BOUTIQUE and Maharishi (Kevin Leahy; b. 1965, London, UK)
Working under the name WAR BOUTIQUE, London-based artist Kevin Leahy transforms military materials and strategies of defense into sculptural garments. Striking Suit (2017) fuses the tailored elegance of a business suit with the armor of riot gear, collapsing distinctions between power dressing and protection. The suit’s color palette echoes the chromatic coding on the accompanying police baton chart poster, which maps the escalating levels of trauma caused by strikes to different parts of the body. At once uniform and fashion statement, the work highlights how clothing operates as both shield and signal; projecting authority while concealing vulnerability. By reframing protective gear through the codes of menswear, WAR BOUTIQUE investigates the politics of dress and the ways fabrics and forms of clothing stage identity, aggression, and survival.
And Warhol (b. 1928, Pittsburgh, PA – d. 1987, New York, NY)
A leading figure in the pop art movement, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) challenged distinctions between “high” art and mass culture, drawing imagery from advertising, consumer products, comics, and celebrity culture. Warhol launched his career in the 1950s as a leading commercial illustrator, becoming the exclusive artist behind I. Miller & Sons’ celebrated shoe advertisements. Later he would insist, “I’m still a commercial artist. I’ve always been a commercial artist,” and emphasized the continuity between his advertising work and his fine art. Works such as the early 1950s Fashion Drawings exemplify Warhol’s understanding of how images are circulated in media and established the artist’s identification with shoes that extended to later more personal adaptations.
Fashion shows and society events were natural stages for Warhol, where he observed and chronicled trends with the same attention given to movie stars or consumer products. His Interview magazine, founded in 1969, became a key platform for fashion photography and profiles, further blurring the lines between celebrity journalism, cultural and consumer commentary, and style editorial.