About the Artwork
The Dutch wax-resist batik fabrics that Yinka Shonibare uses to craft historical costumes carry a complex colonial history. Developed in Holland during the mid-nineteenth century as an inexpensive manufactured alternative to Indonesian textiles, European traders marketed it to West Africa, and within a century, the boldly printed cotton became a sign of African identity. Out of cloth he describes as “cross-bred,” Shonibare tailored a traveling costume for Sarah Hewitt, named after one of the founders of the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She and her sister, Eleanor, toured Europe in the early 1880s. Shonibare’s choice to dress the figure in a textile with foreign implications plays with the idea of the “exotic other.” The mannequin teeters on seemingly unstable stilts, undermining her air of lofty superiority. She holds a lorgnette, but without a head she cannot see. Layering contradictory references to race and identity, Shonibare confronts the daunting legacy of colonialism for a post-colonial world.
From Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 89 (2015)
Sarah Hewitt
2005
Yinka Shonibare
born 1962
English
Yoruba
Fiberglass, dutch wax-printed cotton, leather, wood, and steel
Overall: 150 × 45 1/2 × 48 inches (3 m 81 cm × 115.6 cm × 121.9 cm)
Sculpture
Contemporary Art after 1950
Museum purchase, W. Hawkins Ferry Fund, Friends of Modern Art Acquisition Fund, Janis and William Wetsman Foundation Fund, and funds from Lila and Gilbert B. Silverman, and Andrew L. and Gayle Shaw Camden Contemporary and Decorative Art Fund
2006.147
Non-commercial all standard museum
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Provenance
(James Cohan Gallery, New York, New York, USA);2006-present, purchase by the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan, USA)
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Credit Line for Reproduction
© Photo Courtesy the Artist and James Cohan Gallery, NY
Yinka Shonibare, Sarah Hewitt, 2005, fiberglass, Dutch wax-printed cotton, leather, wood, and steel. Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum purchase, W. Hawkins Ferry Fund, Friends of Modern Art Acquisition Fund, et al., 2006.147.
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