Item 400: Support the Mint Museum of Craft + Design’s efforts to acquire Nick Cave’s SOUNDSUIT for our permanent collection.

Nick Cave is a graduate of Kansas City Art Institute and received his Masters from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 1990, Nick joined The School of The Art Institute (Chicago, IL) and now serves as Chair of the Department of Fashion and Design. Cave designed and marketed his own line of men and women’s clothing and ran a successful retail clothing company, ROBAVE, in Chicago for 10 year. During that period, he sold to 300 national and international retailers before turning exclusively to his artistic and teaching practice.

His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe, including the Studio Museum (Harlem, NY), MOCA (Jacksonville, FL), Telfair Museum (Savannah, GA), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), The Art Connexion (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and the Zachata National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland).

Nick has been invited to residency programs around the world. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. He has been the recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Foundation grant, USA Artist Grant, Creative Capital Grant, Joyce Award, Richard Driehaus Foundation Award, Illinois Art Council grants, and most recently the N’DIGO Award. Cave has been featured in such publications as Art News, Art in America, Sculpture magazine and the New York Times.

In his clothing and figurative-based sculptures, collages, installations and performances, artist Nick Cave explores the use of textiles and clothing as conceptual modes of expression. Full-body sculpture that recall ethnographic dress and composed of ephemeral materials such as twigs, dryer lint, bottle caps and recycled garments, the SOUNDSUITS are designed to rattle and resonate with expressive body movements of the wearer. Bringing western culture and ceremonial ritual, they are catalysts for contemplating the condition of the black male in contemporary society. Whether displayed as sculptural forms in museums and galleries or worn as ceremonial garments in performances as video, Cave’s intricate constructions pose fundamental questions about the human conditions in the social and political world.