In collaboration with Creativity Explored, the Museum of Craft and Design is excited to present a fashion-related exhibition featuring unique designs by over 50 Creativity Explored artists. Mode Brut will highlight their practices through textile-based work while inviting collaborators (artists, designers, and brands) to produce and design alongside developmentally disabled artists.

The exhibition challenges museumgoers to think past the familiar modes of apparel by redefining what, and who, is fashionable. It encourages viewers to consider the role fashion can play in responding to questions about accessibility, gender roles, and identity, through the lens of artists with developmental disabilities and at the corner of Visual Arts, Fashion, and Outsider Art. Mode Brut explores the possibility of reinventing the concept of fashion: using odd materials or recycled fabrics, thinking about gender and gender identity through fashion, considering body shapes for adaptive clothing, and more. The display will follow, allowing organic narratives to take place while using the “fashion show” segment as the center of the story, aiming to create stylish, innovative, and humorous compositions.

Focusing on art practice as fashion, the exhibition will feature four collections of inspiring new fashions made by designer teams alongside local artists with developmental disabilities: Creativity Explored Studio Line, community art collective Bonanza, Queer advocate and model Yanni Brumfield, and San Francisco-based Haute Couture fashion brand Tokyo Gamine.

Image: Outfit designed by Ayana “Yanni” Brumfield and Vincent Jackson for Mode Brut, 2021. Image courtesy of Rob Williamson

Tokyo Gamine

Tokyo Gamine was founded in 2015 by designer and artist Yuka Uehara as a way to create couture in collaboration with her clients. Her designs take much inspiration from nature, mythology, and psychology and are often influenced by the wearer’s personal history. The label has since been seen on many red carpet events such as San Francisco Opera, Symphony, and Ballet openings and balls and several film events such as the Academy Awards. Tokyo Gamine is also responsible for dressing the SF Girls Chorus and the SF Symphony’s production of Candide and has produced two ready-to-wear lines.

Bonanza

Bonanza is the collaborative practice of Conrad Guevara, Lindsay Tully, and Lana Williams. The singular name, Bonanza, acts as the persona under which they perform. It is with this moniker that they challenge the notion of the singular, heroic artist. Bonanza’s diverse projects include installation, film, fashion, and performance. Their work strategically challenges the fixity of identity through different forms of signaling, posturing, flexibility, and resilience.

Bonanza’s work has been exhibited at Gallery 16, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Their work has been written about by VICE, SFAQ, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, and East Bay Express. They were selected for the San Francisco Recology Center artist in residence program in 2018, and recently finished their fourth film – a gig comedy that satirizes the so-called sharing economy and the excessive demands it makes on its workers. Read “How Artists Transformed San Francisco’s Trash into an Audacious Runway Show” in KQED to learn about and see fashions from their Recology residency.

Ayana ‘Yanni’ Brumfield

Ayana ‘Yanni’ Brumfield is a Black, queer, non-binary, multimedia artist from Oakland, CA. They are a community activist, public speaker, and event producer.

Brumfield is the founder of the annual Limitless Queer Fashion Show, which prioritizes increasing representation of people who look like them in the fashion industry. They regularly walk in New York fashion week, have been featured in Teen Vogue, Vogue, Allure, Paper Magazine, among others. Brumfield also curates discussion circles, food drives, and nightlife events; their life’s work is to uplift and to help others find their confidence and live authentically. See “’Generations of Resistance’: San Francisco begins Pride celebrations” on ABC7 to learn about the Limitless Queer Fashion Show and hear more from Brumfield.

Victor Molina (Creativity Explored Studio Line)

Victor Molina is a teaching artist at Creativity Explored, heralding from pre-revolution Havana, Cuba. After the revolution, his family moved to Pasadena, California and later Molina moved to Los Angeles, working as a fashion designer and illustrator. Running an equity waiver theater in Silverlake proved a formative experience, collaborating with a team of creatives much like our collective studio at CE. Later, Molina moved to Montreal where he started a clothing design company crafting one-of-a-kind items and collections for boutiques.

Molina was first introduced to the CE studio in 2010 as a volunteer artist-in-residence, creating hat sculptures with CE artists. He feels extremely fortunate to have found the CE community and joined the staff as a substitute teaching artist in 2013. In his spare time, he enjoys reading about the philosophy of mind and history of ideas and practicing mindfulness meditation.

Many of the garments in the CE studio line feature embroidery and projects artists created as part of the City College of San Francisco surface design class, which has been meeting at the CE studios for over 30 years and virtually during the pandemic.