Dress Up, Speak Up Exhibition Celebration

21c Museum Hotel St. Louis is excited to announce the opening of Dress Up, Speak Up: Regalia and Resistance, a group exhibition featuring more than eighty artworks by contemporary artists from around the world, including Ebony G. Patterson, April Bey, Jeffrey Gibson, Bae Joonsung, Fahamu Pecou, and Wilmer Wilson IV. Creating work in a variety of materials and styles, the artists reference and refashion historical, religious, and cultural imagery to shift perspectives of whom is culturally visible.

Dress Up, Speak Up will open to the public on Thursday, July 16 and remain on view through June 2027. A reception celebrating the exhibition will be held from 5-8pm. The evening will feature light appetizers, a cash bar, and introductory remarks by 21c St. Louis Museum Manager Angie Villa and a short panel conversation with featured artists Damon Davis, Yowshien Kuo, and Yvonne Osei discussing their work and relationships to the exhibtion as a whole.

This event is free and open to the public, and the exhibition is open, free of charge, 24/7.

Bedecked and bejeweled, the figures populating Dress Up, Speak Up occupy fluid space and time, evoking past and present, fact and fiction, memory and desire, to illuminate the complexity of contemporary identity. Whether clad in the traditional coverings of ancient religious tradition, or the gender-bending bling of popular culture, these representations of self and other role-play in real time, reach back through history to address prevailing personal, social, and political challenges.

Artists amplify and celebrate everyday experiences and materials that confront, transform, and redefine cultural visibility, while others recast themselves into living instruments of protest, using performance to challenge historical injustices that continue to shape the present. The exhibition is filled with artworks portraying costumed figures boldly enacting and confronting the legacy of embedded experience in colorful, texture-filled regalia.