![]() ![]() ![]() There’s a lot of flounces and frills too, with bows and cute decorative details, hinting at what ‘feminine’ might have been meant back in Sylvia’s day. There’s an abundance of simple shift dresses, reflecting the long summers of warm weather presumably, often piped and trimmed, occasionally featuring dramatically large prints. I was really interested in the pre-80s stuff made locally or within the USA. The clothes at the store are a snapshot of Southern Style, from well before 1939, when Sylvia first started to collect, to 1997. She planned to wear an outfit a day from the collection for the duration of her stay, documenting and displaying her selection within the museum, as well as capturing stories from local visitors who remember the clothes and might even have worn something similar. I naturally wandered towards the floor-to ceiling rails of vintage clothes, crammed into two rooms and while MAD got on with his thing, I befriended Canadian theatre artist Megan. It’s overwhelming when you first visit, there is SO MUCH stuff, all organised by category. Visitors are positively encouraged to hang out and observe the artists at their practice. There were four other artists working alongside MAD, Alex Meiser, Janelle Beasley, Alix Pentecost-Farren and Megan Stewart, all living and working within the store environment. Nothing is for sale, so although visitors are more than welcome to come and interact with the artists and browse the weird and wonderful stuff piled up everywhere, they can’t buy anything. Art is created from anything found within the walls, using decades worth of thrift -from kids toys to vinyl records (guess what MAD headed for) via rooms full of fabrics, vintage clothes and kitchen paraphanalia, all collected by Sylvia. When she died in 2000, the store lay abandoned, still stuffed to the rafters with all of Sylvia’s purchases (we can safely say she was not a minimalist) until her grandson, curator George Scheer, received funding from a number of institutions – including the Andy Warhol Foundation- to open up it as a living museum.Īfter considerable time spent refurbishing the building and organising the stock, George now brings in around 50 artists a year, from all over the world to work within the space. Based in a large three story building, it was an old thrift shop, run until 1997 by Sylvia Gray, who had been collecting and selling thrift since 1939. We are back! Hope your summer was good and you didn’t miss us too much.įor part of our summer break, I ended up in Greensboro, North Carolina, because Middleagedad had an Artist in Residence spot for five weeks at the Elsewhere Living Museum. ![]()
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