Marilyn Pappas
Marilyn Pappas, 2020. Photo by Julia Featheringill, courtesy Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
What is it, exactly? Opera Coat spills across a full page of the Objects: USA catalogue, in color—a treatment afforded to relatively few works in the show. It looks a little like a pinned butterfly, a garment lying flat, stitched to a canvas, unworn and evidently unwearable. It is filled with another spill, of loose yarns and textile scraps, a polychromatic waterfall, equal parts Rauschenberg and bargain basement bin. Its maker, Marilyn Pappas, had debuted onto the craft scene a few years earlier, in the 1962 edition of Young Americans, the pulse-taking exhibition series organized at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Her Opera Coat was, in intent, no different from many other ceramic and fiber sculptures that populated Objects: USA—“One-of-a-kind pieces that were not meant to do anything utilitarian, just hang on the wall or be placed in a room,” as Pappas put it.¹
But her decision to apply the same principle to clothing—at a time when the concept of “wearable art” was still a decade off—came across as uncanny and surrealistic. It was a direction she continued for a few years more—Flight Suit, included here, which plays on the idea of a body hanging from a parachute, is a terrific example, bursting with countercultural, anti-establishment energy.
Knapsack #1 mixed media assemblage.
Designed and made by Marilyn Pappas, USA, 1971.
28" L x 7.5" W x 51" H
71.1cm L x 19.1cm W x 129.5cm H
SM8132
Flight Suit in mixed media assemblage.
Designed and made by Marilyn Pappas, USA, 1972.
SP1256
Courtesy of the artist