installation view
At Vulpes Bastille, 40 coveralls hang suspended from the ceiling on silver hangers, forming a grid across the entire main gallery. Moving among the grid is like walking through a regiment of soldiers in formation, yet pausing anywhere within the grid reveals a new view of the coveralls. Each set offers a unique site of interrogation where artists grapple with what we’ve been promised and what we’ve been given. Confronting each pair of coveralls, the illusion of regimented conformity dissolves.
Co-curators Adams Puryear and Nina Littrell posed a simple challenge to 50 local artists: redefine the American Dream by altering a pair of work coveralls. The result is “What Work Is,” an exhibition that questions the myths of labor, aspiration and identity in contemporary America.
The coverall itself carries symbolic weight. For generations, uniforms such as this represented an implicit contract: wear this for eight hours a day, collect your wage, relax in the evenings, and inch towards something better. The exhibition dismantles that promise, revealing the tensions between conformity and individuality, assimilation and protest.
Some artists embrace bold defiance. Steph Becker transforms the coveralls into mock currency. Celina Curry applies neon vinyl splashes over black-painted fabric, conjuring the carpeted floors of arcades and skating rinks — spaces of leisure that exist in opposition to the grinding work hours. These pieces and others reject concealment entirely, splaying color and design across every surface. Haley Wooten and Sabrina Strausbaugh offer a gentler vision, painting blue sky across the torso and sleeves, green prairie grass on the legs, a homage to “America the Beautiful” and folk-art traditions.
Others work with subtlety and absence. Hadley Clark’s transparent coveralls render the uniform nearly invisible, suggesting that such clothing has always functioned to erase the worker’s individuality rather than protect it. Stink E. Cur takes this erasure to its logical conclusion: the coveralls have been burned, leaving only the blackened shoulders and collar on the hanger, with a pile of ash below. The title says it all: Burnout.
Several artists explore immigration and assimilation. Michelle Chan, Chaneryna Thach and Raleigh Gonzales examine their families’ experiences navigating American work culture while attempting to preserve their own traditions. These pieces remind us that the American Dream has always demanded a series of negotiations within the self.
Not all the work screams for attention. Some coveralls keep their modifications hidden in pockets and sleeves, protecting their individuality from view. Restraint can be intentional, even necessary. In a culture that demands constant visibility and performance, concealment becomes its own form of protection, its own element of labor.
Artists today face gutted arts funding and a government increasingly hostile to any art that is incongruent with its political aims, all while managing the daily contradiction of working for survival while trying to sustain creative practice. The coverall becomes a meditation on this tension — the blue-collar ethos of showing up every day, doing the work, even when a promised payoff feels increasingly remote.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that people are “more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Standing among these transformed uniforms, that observation cuts deep. Taken together, the 50 artists in “What Work Is” seem to be seeking alteration, interrogation and abolition over the suffering that accompanies faith in empty promises.
“What Work Is” continues at Vulpes Bastille, 1737 Locust St., through Jan. 24. Hours are 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information, vulpesbastille.com/.
