Cave, Nick

Nick Cave, (born February 4, 1959, Jefferson City, Missouri, U.S.), American artist best known for his wearable mixed-media constructions known as Soundsuits, which act simultaneously as fashion, sculpture, and noisemaking performance art.

Cave began exploring fibre arts and fashion while attending the Kansas City Art Institute (B.F.A.; 1982), Missouri. During his time there he also studied with Alvin Ailey’s modern dance company, initiating his active interest in constructing a bridge between dance, fashion, and art. He earned a master’s degree in fine arts (1989) at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and later became chair of the fashion design program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Throughout his career, Cave made use of found and ready-made materials to reference cultural, political, and autobiographical issues.

By his own account, Cave made his first Soundsuit shortly after the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. He made it by wiring cut and drilled twigs to a handmade cotton undergarment and realized the piece’s performative potential only once it had been completed. Using a myriad of techniques and materials, he continued to create the hybrid objects, which ranged from formfitting bodysuits composed of intricately sewn fabrics and beads to amorphous suits made of natural materials such as woven hair. The Soundsuits—named for the sounds made when worn by performers—conceal and transform identity, race, and gender while encouraging movement and creating noise that reflects their chosen materials and construction. Their meanings shift and multiply with each exhibition and performance, set in places as varied as the theatre stage, fashion runway, and city street.

Echoing his ongoing exploration of issues relating to identity and politics, Cave used recycled materials in a series of sculptures and installations that equally cited crafts and rituals. With these objects and his Soundsuits, Cave borrowed from a wide range of disciplines and cultures in an effort to examine and challenge notions of personal and cultural identity.

Many critics noted that, through his Soundsuits, Cave not only refashioned mundane objects into something beautiful, but he also transformed painful experiences into something hopeful. Works such as Until (2016), Cave’s installation for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, showed that his work could also embed trauma in the thick of beauty. For the piece, Cave converted a former factory building into what appeared to be a magical landscape the length of a football field. Yet, as viewers passed through, they were confronted with symbols of violence and racist imagery. Thousands of hanging wind spinners created a dazzling curtain, but amid the innocuous starburst and smiley face doodads were more-menacing ornaments shaped as guns, bullets, and tears. Patrons then encountered a sparkling cloud made up of chandeliers and crystals above which viewers could glimpse a forest of ceramic birds, flowers, and animals. Tucked within the trinkets, however, were antique lawn jockeys painted with blackface. The racist artifacts from the pre-civil-rights era caricatured African Americans. Cave placed such unsettling objects among pleasing baubles as if to startle viewers out of their complacency and engage them with the ongoing problems of gun violence and racial inequality in the United States.

Cave continued to create works that turned grief and anger into something more promising, especially as political tensions in the United States rose in subsequent years. Events such as the 2017 white nationalist rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, left many Americans reeling. For The Let Go(2018), Cave invited patrons to work through their emotions by dancing in the space he created in the Park Avenue Armory, New York, New York. The installation also featured a number of musical and dance performances. In 2019 Cave began a series of sculptures intended as celebratory replacements for the plinths left empty by the movement to take down Confederate monuments. Titled A·mal·gam, the works resemble bronze castings of Soundsuits.

Amid the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer (2020), Cave invited friends and colleagues to question their own biases or actions. They then handwrote their accounts and resolutions on the windows of Cave’s studio and gallery space in Chicago. The performance piece, entitled Amends, also called on the local community to reflect and write about their experiences on yellow ribbons. Participants then tied the ribbons onto a clothesline mounted in the schoolyard across the street.

In 2022 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, organized a major career retrospective (“Forothermore”) of Cave’s work.