Skip to main content

Due to required maintenance, some galleries and artwork may be off view. Learn more

Due to required maintenance, some galleries and artwork may be off view. Learn more

“Paloma” Cigarette Dress, Fall/Winter 2013 (Eccentric Lady Collection), designed by Gerlan Jeans in collaboration with Degen, New York (On loan from Gerlan Jeans) — “Paloma” Cigarette Dress, Fall/Winter 2013 (Eccentric Lady Collection), designed by Gerlan Jeans in collaboration with Degen, New York (On loan from Gerlan Jeans)

Exhibition

Gerlan Jeans Loves Patrick Kelly

April 27–December 7, 2014

“ Almost all of what's out there today has some element of Patrick in it.” Gerlan Marcel, 2013 The legacy of the late African American fashion designer Patrick Kelly (c. 1954–1990) endures in the whimsical street-wear brand Gerlan Jeans. Launched in 2009 by New York–based designer and graphic artist Gerlan Marcel (born 1976), Gerlan Jeans reinterprets Kelly's signature bows, buttons, and other bold embellishments to create clothes for men and women "who have a sense of fearlessness in the way they dress." Similar to Kelly's fashions, which were inspired by the designer's Mississippi childhood, Gerlan Jeans reflects Marcel's Midwest upbringing, in particular her teenage experiences with American mall culture and admiration for 1980s and 1990s jeans brands such as Esprit and Benetton.

A graduate of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, Gerlan Marcel honed her talents working for Jeremy Scott and Patricia Field, among other designers. As with Kelly's clothes, Gerlan Jeans reveals Marcel's extensive knowledge of Western pop culture, from the fluorescent green, slime-covered designs of its Mall Witch Spring/Summer 2012 collection (inspired by Nickelodeon's hit TV show You Can't Do That on Television) to the appropriation of Disney's Minnie Mouse as the muse for its polka-dotted, bow-dazzled Gerl Power Spring/Summer 2013 line.

Marcel's admiration for Kelly and his provocative collections ("All his energy as a designer is in every single piece") is seen not only in Gerlan Jeans' creative use of Kelly's trademark motifs, but also in its imaginatively printed fabrics and love of fully accessorized, head-to-toe dressing, all presented with a sense of humor: "I'm very, very serious about taking myself less seriously."

Gerlan Jeans Loves Patrick Kelly

Gerlan Jeans runway highlights

Joan Spain Gallery, first floor, Perelman Building

Main Building

In addition to Gerlan Jeans designs, this exhibition will showcase videos of Patrick Kelly's high-spirited runway shows, a complement to the exhibition , concurrently on view in the Perelman Building's Special Exhibitions Gallery.

Left:
Designed by Patrick Kelly, American (active Paris), c. 1954–1990
Woman’s Evening Dress and Pair of Gloves
Fall/Winter 1988–89
Promised gift of Bjorn Guil Amelan and Bill T. Jones
Right:
Designed by Gerlan Jeans, New York, 2009–present
“Take a Bow” Dress
Designed by Chuckie Amos, American, born 1969
Bow Braid
Fall/Winter 2009
Peace and Love, Inc. Collection
On loan from Gerlan Jeans
Gerlan Jeans has played with fashion archetypes since launching its first collection, Peace & Love, Inc., in Fall/Winter 2009. The ensemble on the right, covered in bows like the Patrick Kelly dress and gloves on the left, was inspired by the idea of aliens landing on Earth. “They arrive here and don’t know how our clothes are worn, how our accessories are worn, and so they wear them in out-of-this-world ways,” explains Marcel.

Left:
Designed by Patrick Kelly, American (active Paris), c. 1954–1990
Woman’s Ensemble: Jacket, Skirt, Headband, Gloves, and Lapel Pins
Fall/Winter 1988–89
Promised gift of Bjorn Guil Amelan and Bill T. Jones
Right:
Designed by Gerlan Jeans, New York, 2009–present
“Koko” Cropped Jacket and “Brat Pack” Ruffle Skirt in “Flamingo Fiesta” Print, “Malibu” Sport Bra
Spring/Summer 2011
Jeans & Satin Collection
On loan from Gerlan Jeans
Funded via Kickstarter, the Jeans & Satin collection fashion show was Gerlan Jeans’ “richest and most glamorous” presentation to date. Inspired by the event’s benefactors—“people who love Gerlan Jeans”—Gerlan Marcel and her team channeled red-carpet dressing through their signature street-style lens. Like Patrick Kelly, they playfully reinterpreted Coco Chanel’s classic tweed suit, accessorizing it with layers of “cartoon-sized” pearl jewelry, another Chanel staple.

Left:
Designed by Patrick Kelly, American (active Paris), c. 1954–1990
Woman’s Dress
Fall/Winter 1986–87
Promised gift of Bjorn Guil Amelan and Bill T. Jones
Right:
Designed by Gerlan Jeans, New York, 2009–present
“Riot Princess” Bustier Dress
Spring/Summer 2013
Gerl Power Collection
On loan from Gerlan Jeans
While Patrick Kelly’s famed button-covered designs evoked his grandmother’s mending, Gerlan Jeans buttons are inspired by the slogan buttons of the 1970s feminist movement. Here the designer playfully adapts feminist mottoes to create smart, tongue-in-cheek sayings for a new generation of women. Embodying notions of freedom of speech and self-expression, the buttons allow the wearer to quite literally wear her opinions on her sleeve.

Curators

Laura Camerlengo, Exhibition Assistant in the Department of Costume and Textiles

Related Events

Check out the variety of events offered by this program, for members and the public alike.

Paintings

The Large Bathers

This is the largest, the last, and in many ways, the most ambitious work from Cézanne’s lifelong exploration of the time-honored theme of nudes in a landscape. It is also, perhaps, in its unfinished state, the purest and most serene witness to the man whom Paul Gauguin described as spending “entire days on mountaintops reading Virgil,” dreaming of wooded glades populated with beautiful figures who, if not exactly participants in a narrative as such, are full of animation and interaction. Perhaps it is its grand nobility—its authority as something beyond time, “like art in the museums,” as Cézanne said—that made it so attractive to many artists.

Paintings

Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I)

In 1795 the Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale painted this illusionistic portrait to showcase his artistic skills. At the same time, he wished to represent the roles played by two of his sons at Peale’s Museum, the first American museum created to educate and entertain the public.

Titian Ramsay Peale, who crafted natural science displays, gestures at the top of the stairs as his older brother, Raphaelle, an artist with his palette in hand, strides upward just above a real step attached to the base of the canvas. The life-size portrait is known to have startled and delighted visitors, reputedly even George Washington, before the Peale Museum’s collection was dismantled and finally sold in 1854. Acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945, the picture continues to engage and welcome visitors.

Vases

All about the Benjamins Century Vase

Here you will find Benjamin Franklin as you’ve never seen him before. Philadelphia-born artist Roberto Lugo riffs on the traditional representations of Franklin found throughout the city—ones that celebrate him as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. You can see one such stately portrayal of Franklin directly behind you, in gallery 384. Lugo places Franklin within a constellation of songs, symbols, and rappers’ names—ones that shaped his childhood and adult life. The artist also includes his own self-portrait on the other side of the vase, creating an imagined dialogue between himself and Franklin around the themes of money, history, violence, and success.

Paintings

Fall of the Castle

This painting won the Silver Prize at the 1902 Japan Art Academy exhibition. The woman in the scene is bidding farewell to her two children and preparing to cut off her hair before entering a Buddhist nunnery, as was customary for aristocratic women in medieval Japan after the death of a husband.

Paintings

Vincent van Gogh painted this luminous image of sunflowers from memory, in the depths of winter in 1889. Throughout his ten-year career, Van Gogh painted sunflowers repeatedly in different arrangements and settings. The shapes, colors, and cheerfulness of the modest flower appealed to him. He associated its yellow color with sunshine, the south, and Christ, the light of the world. Over a single week in August 1888, Van Gogh painted four pictures of sunflowers, including a bold canvas of twelve sunflowers against a turquoise ground, now in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich. The speed of this work was driven by enthusiasm and necessity since the flowers were destined to wilt and fade. This painting is a variation on the work now in Munich. Far from being a simple copy, it is a new interpretation that gives each flower a pronounced personality.

Sculpture

Goddess Figure (Chalchiuhtlicue)

Quilts

"Tar Beach 2" Quilt

Ringgold’s Tar Beach 2 quilt communicates the dreams and hopes of a young African American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot. Her story is based on the artist’s own memories of growing up in Harlem, New York, but is enlivened with fantasy. Flying among the stars on a hot summer night, Cassie becomes a heroic explorer overcoming obstacles. Ringgold’s combination of image and imagination, text and texture puts a unique, contemporary spin on the traditions of both quilting and storytelling.

Architectural elements

Ceremonial Teahouse: Sunkaraku (Evanescent Joys)

This ceremonial teahouse was built in about 1917 by the Japanese architect Ögi Rodö. Designed in the rustic tradition or "artless style" of the fifteenth-century artist Oguri Sotan, it also incorporates eighteenth-century elements. The Sunkaraku teahouse originally stood on the grounds of Rodö's private residence in Tokyo. He sold it to the Museum in 1928, and in 1957 it was installed at the Museum, making it the only work by Rodö outside Japan. The garden setting you see now was planned by one of Japan's foremost contemporary garden designers, Matsunosuke Tatsui.

The apparent artlessness of the teahouse in fact conceals acute attention to detail and to aesthetic pleasure. The architecture of both the waiting room and the tearoom reveals a special delight in natural materials such as cypress shingles (for the roof) and bamboo. Proximity to nature is also emphasized by the garden, visible from both buildings. Everything inside the tearoom has been planned to stimulate the mind and to delight the eye. Rough, unfinished vertical posts remind guests of their imperfections and their oneness with nature, and the tea utensils enhance their sensitivity to natural textures and artistic creativity.

The tea ceremony offers a temporary respite from the complexities of daily life. This mood perhaps inspired a famous devotee of the tea cult, Lord Fumai Matsudaira (1750-1818), when he autographed the tablet over the teahouse with the inscription "Sun Ka Raku," or Evanescent Joys.

1/12

Paintings

The Large Bathers

This is the largest, the last, and in many ways, the most ambitious work from Cézanne’s lifelong exploration of the time-honored theme of nudes in a landscape. It is also, perhaps, in its unfinished state, the purest and most serene witness to the man whom Paul Gauguin described as spending “entire days on mountaintops reading Virgil,” dreaming of wooded glades populated with beautiful figures who, if not exactly participants in a narrative as such, are full of animation and interaction. Perhaps it is its grand nobility—its authority as something beyond time, “like art in the museums,” as Cézanne said—that made it so attractive to many artists.

Paintings

Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I)

In 1795 the Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale painted this illusionistic portrait to showcase his artistic skills. At the same time, he wished to represent the roles played by two of his sons at Peale’s Museum, the first American museum created to educate and entertain the public.

Titian Ramsay Peale, who crafted natural science displays, gestures at the top of the stairs as his older brother, Raphaelle, an artist with his palette in hand, strides upward just above a real step attached to the base of the canvas. The life-size portrait is known to have startled and delighted visitors, reputedly even George Washington, before the Peale Museum’s collection was dismantled and finally sold in 1854. Acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945, the picture continues to engage and welcome visitors.

Vases

All about the Benjamins Century Vase

Here you will find Benjamin Franklin as you’ve never seen him before. Philadelphia-born artist Roberto Lugo riffs on the traditional representations of Franklin found throughout the city—ones that celebrate him as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. You can see one such stately portrayal of Franklin directly behind you, in gallery 384. Lugo places Franklin within a constellation of songs, symbols, and rappers’ names—ones that shaped his childhood and adult life. The artist also includes his own self-portrait on the other side of the vase, creating an imagined dialogue between himself and Franklin around the themes of money, history, violence, and success.

Paintings

Fall of the Castle

This painting won the Silver Prize at the 1902 Japan Art Academy exhibition. The woman in the scene is bidding farewell to her two children and preparing to cut off her hair before entering a Buddhist nunnery, as was customary for aristocratic women in medieval Japan after the death of a husband.

Paintings

Vincent van Gogh painted this luminous image of sunflowers from memory, in the depths of winter in 1889. Throughout his ten-year career, Van Gogh painted sunflowers repeatedly in different arrangements and settings. The shapes, colors, and cheerfulness of the modest flower appealed to him. He associated its yellow color with sunshine, the south, and Christ, the light of the world. Over a single week in August 1888, Van Gogh painted four pictures of sunflowers, including a bold canvas of twelve sunflowers against a turquoise ground, now in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich. The speed of this work was driven by enthusiasm and necessity since the flowers were destined to wilt and fade. This painting is a variation on the work now in Munich. Far from being a simple copy, it is a new interpretation that gives each flower a pronounced personality.

Sculpture

Goddess Figure (Chalchiuhtlicue)

Quilts

"Tar Beach 2" Quilt

Ringgold’s Tar Beach 2 quilt communicates the dreams and hopes of a young African American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot. Her story is based on the artist’s own memories of growing up in Harlem, New York, but is enlivened with fantasy. Flying among the stars on a hot summer night, Cassie becomes a heroic explorer overcoming obstacles. Ringgold’s combination of image and imagination, text and texture puts a unique, contemporary spin on the traditions of both quilting and storytelling.

Architectural elements

Ceremonial Teahouse: Sunkaraku (Evanescent Joys)

This ceremonial teahouse was built in about 1917 by the Japanese architect Ögi Rodö. Designed in the rustic tradition or "artless style" of the fifteenth-century artist Oguri Sotan, it also incorporates eighteenth-century elements. The Sunkaraku teahouse originally stood on the grounds of Rodö's private residence in Tokyo. He sold it to the Museum in 1928, and in 1957 it was installed at the Museum, making it the only work by Rodö outside Japan. The garden setting you see now was planned by one of Japan's foremost contemporary garden designers, Matsunosuke Tatsui.

The apparent artlessness of the teahouse in fact conceals acute attention to detail and to aesthetic pleasure. The architecture of both the waiting room and the tearoom reveals a special delight in natural materials such as cypress shingles (for the roof) and bamboo. Proximity to nature is also emphasized by the garden, visible from both buildings. Everything inside the tearoom has been planned to stimulate the mind and to delight the eye. Rough, unfinished vertical posts remind guests of their imperfections and their oneness with nature, and the tea utensils enhance their sensitivity to natural textures and artistic creativity.

The tea ceremony offers a temporary respite from the complexities of daily life. This mood perhaps inspired a famous devotee of the tea cult, Lord Fumai Matsudaira (1750-1818), when he autographed the tablet over the teahouse with the inscription "Sun Ka Raku," or Evanescent Joys.

Computer keyboard

Single-Handed Keyboard (right hand)

Wedding dresses

Grace Kelly's Wedding Dress and Accessories

From the crownlike wreath topping the headpiece to the bows down the back of the graceful train, Grace Kelly's wedding ensemble is simple but exquisitely detailed. Delicate rose point lace, a type of nineteenth-century Brussels needle lace that features elaborate floral motifs, forms the bodice, which appears seamless because the lace motifs were detached from their original ground and pieced together to follow the shaping of the dress. Touches of the lace, accented with lustrous seed pearls, unify the gown and accessories. The dress itself is constructed in four complex parts: the lace bodice with an attached underbodice, skirt support, and slip; a heavily pleated silk faille skirt that incorporates a smoothing petticoat, ruffled petticoat, and foundation petticoat; a triangular tulle and lace train insert; and a pleated silk faille cummerbund.

Paintings

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) peels away the traditional beauty of the nude in art, its carnality, even its identifiable sex. Instead, the painting aims to expand our perception of the human body in motion, a topic of fascination for Duchamp around this time. Though the work exemplifies his extremely original engagement with Cubism, it also precipitated his break with the Cubists. When Duchamp presented it for exhibition in Paris in 1912, fellow Cubists on the hanging committee tried to exclude it. They may have objected to the idea of painting dynamic movement, or the unfamiliar subject of a nude on a flight of stairs, or the title written in block letters at the lower margin. When the work was finally presented at the Armory Show, which made the case for modern art to large audiences in New York in 1913, it met with a hostile public reaction—and cemented Duchamp’s reputation as an artistic provocateur.

Drawings

Untitled No. 89

Howardena Pindell created this work from thousands of small circular bits of paper—pieces left behind after using a hole punch. Pindell’s work with paper dots is deeply labor intensive: she carefully and patiently punched, collected, and painted these small dots, and then affixed them to a board with thread embellished with glitter. The colorful circles protrude as they interact with the flecks of glitter to create a luminous effect, reminiscent of Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings, which Pindell studied closely while working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Check out other exhibitions

View full calendar