With the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the Fashion Designer Susan Cianciolo is Turning Into an Art Star At Last
In 1995, Susan Cianciolo made her debut as a fashion designer at Andrea Rosen Gallery, in New York. Two strips of red tape on the floor demarcated a runway, and the first model walked out flipping a switchblade. For the next several years, Cianciolo would continue to stage shows in sync with the New York Fashion Week calendar, but even when she was most in fashion, she was never really of it. In 1996, she showed in an abandoned garage, the makeshift runway cobbled together from shipping pallets she and a friend had fished from Dumpsters and covered with brown craft paper. Another show, in an empty storefront on lower Broadway, included spoken-word performances and programs hand-decorated by skate phenom and urban poet Mark Gonzales.
Cianciolo referred to her collections not by season and year but by the word Run, followed by a number. She offered up not only finished garments but also, every so often, a DIY kit that invited women to participate in the making of, say, a denim skirt. The kits were a natural extension of her practice—a way of widening the sewing and knitting circles that she regularly assembled to help produce her collections, and which included her mother as well as like-minded friends such as the artist Rita Ackermann (and, on occasion, Rita’s grandmother). “And, in between, I was doing exhibitions,” Cianciolo recalls one morning in December, as we sit in the sunny living area of the apartment she shares with her 8-year-old daughter, Lilac, in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I wasn’t just having a normal fashion-designer life.” All around us is evidence of her prolific creative output, which spans films, performances, collages, mobiles, drawings, zines. For Cianciolo, it has always been all of a piece—but just try explaining that to the media. During the 1990s, she says, pretty much every interview she sat for opened with “So, are you an artist, or are you a fashion designer?” It was a question that always incited a sense of panic in Cianciolo—one she could not answer even for herself. “When I was still in my 20s, the New School invited me to give a lecture on being an anarchist,” she recalls, still visibly amused by the memory. “I said, ‘Are you sure? I feel like you have the wrong person.’ ”
Cianciolo, 47, was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her parents divorced when she was young, and though she spent time with her father, who moved to Maine, she was raised by her mother, and her maternal grandparents and great-grandmother. The family did not have money (her mother worked for the prison system); Cianciolo says that her handmade clothes and hand-knit sweaters were a constant source of embarrassment. She was allowed to attend college only on the condition that she learn a trade; becoming an artist was out of the question. She was accepted into the fashion department at Parsons School of Design with a partial scholarship but says, “My professors all begged me to change my major to fine art.” She found work as a fashion illustrator for Geoffrey Beene and as an assistant designer at Badgley Mischka, and created window displays for Bergdorf Goodman. When she started Run, she was just three years out of school and working part time for X-Girl, the streetwear brand fronted by Kim Gordon and Daisy von Furth.
More than 20 years later, Cianciolo has, at last, come into her own as the artist she has always been. In 2015, she was included in “Greater New York,” the high-profile survey of local talent at MoMA PS1, in Long Island City, Queens. That same year, her first solo show with Bridget Donahue gallery opened to critical acclaim and then traveled, in expanded form, to 356 S. Mission Rd., in Los Angeles, and on to Yale Union, in Portland, Oregon. This June, Cianciolo will inaugurate a new space for Stuart Shave Modern Art, in London, and will present a second solo show with Donahue in September. And just to seal the deal, she is one of 63 artists selected for this year’s much-anticipated Whitney Biennial, the museum’s first in its new building in downtown Manhattan.
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