Art Walks The Runway: Ten Years of KMAC Couture

April 20, 2022 – August 14, 2022

Reception: Friday, May 13, 2022, 5-8pm

 

In 2013, KMAC Couture started as a fundraising effort allowing the museum to showcase its unique position as a contemporary art museum that celebrates ideas at the crossroads of art, craft, and design. The first KMAC Couture was held in the museum and had an attendance of about 200. Ten years later, KMAC Couture has regularly brought in well over 800 and takes up the entire block of Main Street in which the museum resides. Despite the change in scale, KMAC Couture remains as an event organized around the spirit of belonging and inclusion, bringing together a wide range of creative thinkers, professional artists and designers, and first-time makers while reaching across different cultural and social backgrounds and generational age groups. Over the years, participants have invented their own textiles and employed unconventional materials that push the bounds of wearability, constructing work that can be both costume and sculpture. Others have created fantastical garments with a more functional and durable quality, but are likewise extraordinary in how they explore the range of possibilities for artistic expression through the items we wear, canvassing the human body in limitless ways.