Nick Cave's Exuberant Soundsuits

A photo essay from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

After I got off the train from Ann Arbor to Chicago last week, I made a beeline to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Luggage in tow, I booked it from Union Station to see the final hours of Nick Cave’s exhibition, forOTHERmore before it closed on October 2nd.

There is usually one particularly memorable exhibit out of all of the museums and galleries I go to throughout the year that plants seeds and continuously flowers in my brain. Last year, it was Bisa Butler’s Portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago. This year, it’s a tie between the Berlin Biennale, which I saw this past summer, and forOTHERmore, Nick Cave’s first career retrospective aptly shown in his hometown of Chicago.

This week, I wanted to share a photo essay on this exhibit from one of my favorite artists, from one of my favorite cities.

Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago

I arrived at the MCA just before 3:00 p.m., in time for their last screening of Nick Cave and Jack Cave’s 376 Days, a documentary about a multimedia collaboration between Nick and his brother Jack, a fashion designer, entitled The Color Is. Nick took inspiration for the name and staging of this show from the “Emerald City Sequence” in The Wiz. (“'Till I change my mind, the color is red!”) The day before, I had just visited the Motown Museum in Detroit, so it felt especially exciting to connect that source of inspiration to the art I was about to experience. The Color Is combined the concepts and aesthetics of the Cave brothers into an extravagant fashion performance at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, and “paid tribute to Black excellence and innovation throughout history.” The documentary chronicled the detailed, thoughtful, and painstaking process for developing forOTHERmore and The Color Is simultaneously, and how the brothers bridged their different yet complimentary creative approaches.

Introductory exhibition text at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Nick Cave is most well-known for his Soundsuits, which are towering, vibrant garments that function as exuberant suits of armor. Being in the presence of them makes your synapses sparkle; your visual cortex becomes a disco. Nick Cave exists between the realms of conceptual art and couture, making fashion performance projects like The Color Is feel like a natural progression of expression from the museum spaces he has activated for decades.

Nick Cave’s Speak Louder, 2011 and Tondo, 2022 (behind on the wall)

Soundsuits

“Nick Cave began his Soundsuit series following the Los Angeles Police Department’s brutal beating of Rodney King in 1991, which a witness captured on video. Soon after seeing the footage on the news, Cave sat in a Chicago park, contemplating King’s treatment and the broader injustice of police violence against Black men. As he sat, he began collecting twigs from the ground. He later sewed the twigs into a garment envisioned as a suit of armor: a means of obscuring his identity as a queer Black man for protection while paradoxically amplifying his radical otherness. The origin of the name “Soundsuit” came from the experience of wearing the garment.

According to Cave, “Once I put it on and moved in it, I realized that was the protest—the sound it made. In order to be heard, you gotta make sound.”

—forOTHERmore exhibition text

A close-up of Speak Louder, featuring its black mother-of-pearl buttons.

The hanging piece behind Speak Louder is Tondo, a large, multi-colored fiber disk that visually represents the effects of climate disasters on Black communities.

The exhibition featured 2 rooms of Soundsuiits. Most of these were made in 2021-2022.

To see these Soundsuits in motion, check out this 2014 live performance from the Jack Shainman Gallery via Vogue.

Exhibition text from the Museum of Contemporary Art

This description (above) about reusing reclaimed materials with respect and reverence reminded me of visiting The Heidelberg Project, the outdoor art environment in Detroit that I wrote about last week. Inspired by similar philosophies in incorporating found objects, I found the contrast in execution between Tyree Guyton’s spontaneous chaos and Nick Cave’s meticulous polish fascinating. But from what I observed watching Guyton work in person and Cave’s documentary, they actually share similar approaches. Neither of them sketch or plan much beforehand; they let the materials guide the final outcome. The joy from their work grows from the play in their process. I felt very lucky to witness both artists so close together in time. It made me think about about all my art classes that referenced Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculptures and how I wish I learned about artists like Tyree Guyton and Nick Cave in those same lessons about art that re-contextualized objects into new imaginings and meanings.  

Soundsuit, 2011 is made from twigs, wire, upholstery, a basket, and metal armature. Soundsuit, 2015 behind it, incorporates synthetic hair.

I especially loved this Soundsuit (above) because it reminded me of the first one Nick Cave made, constructed of sticks gathered from the forest, the impulse led by grief and the need to be heard. While these Soundsuits remain motionless on mannequins, this one in particular strikes my imagination. I look at it and hear the sound of rustling branches, sticks snapping underfoot, the crackling of kindling. I love the ambiguity of the woven basket head—does it absorb or emit noise? The body is an instrument itself.

Here is a 2018 video from The Smithsonian of Nick Cave describing how the Soundsuit originated and why after 30 years, he continues making them:

Each Soundsuit contains its own microcosm of layered fabrics, sequins, buttons, fibers, objects, stringed beads, flowers, toys, and other adornments. Even in stillness they convey loudness, a volume expressed visually in space and color. Their joy feels expansive, a welcome imposition of curiosities.

Many pieces included strings of beads and metal leaves and flowers. Hanging on the wall to the right is Beaded Cliff Wall, which Nick Cave made by threading thousands of pony beads onto shoelaces.

Exhibition text at the Museum of Contemporary Art

“What happens when we experience loss at a societal level? Can we still collectively find moments of joy and dance through the pain?”

Soundsuit, 2021 included globes and children’s toys.

In choosing to only write about his Soundsuits, I know I’m not doing justice to the immersive installations, the full range of subject matter, and the awe I experienced walking through Nick Cave’s entire retrospective. Out of all of his thought-provoking, multimedia oeuvre, I gravitated towards his Soundsuits the most, finding myself so intrigued by how Nick Cave confronts this tension between joy and pain. Philosophically, they are at odds with each other, and yet, he constructs a captivating connection of hope between them. His Soundsuits stand as an act of resistance, a collection of objects and materials that burst out in beauty while encasing the wearer in safety. In motion, these suits sound a voice that amplifies the wearer’s presence. There is no hiding or silencing the body—only adorning it, turning its volume up, and inviting more space for it to inhabit. Soundsuits declare to the world that joy lassos fear as a string of beads, absorbs it with silk flowers, and cuts it down with each tiny sequin.

Thanks for reading.

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While forOTHERmore at the MCA is closed now, if you’re in Chicago, you can still see The Color Is: Fashion Exhibition at the DuSable Museum through November 27, 2022. Please go and tell me all about it!

(Unless noted otherwise, all photos were taken by yours truly.)