Artist Jenny Walton brings her sassy feminist art to the Fabric Museum

Last month, Jenny Walton — the Milan-based artist, fashion illustrator, content writer, and vintage fashion collector with several hundred thousand social media followers — visited the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) where her work is a part of “Soft/Cover,” a group show curated by DJ Hellerman, former chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at FWM, and Katy Donoghue, editor in chief at Whitewall magazine. It will remain on view until Aug. 17.

The exhibit presents a nearly 50-year history of the Fabric Workshop as a maker’s space that encouraged experimentation with fabric as art material.

“Katy and I set out to answer the question, ‘What happens when artists bring imaginative thinking to fashion, garments, and objects that relate to the body in space?,’” Hellerman said. They selected items, some rarely seen, from the Fabric Workshop’s archives to focus on the relationship of textiles to fashion and architecture.

The show’s installation may seem like “a funky department store,” remarked Kelly Shindler, the executive director of FWM. There are no mannequins, so wearables along with other pieces like umbrellas are presented as art objects.

The curators invited Walton and seven additional contemporary artists to create new pieces for this exhibit.

“Soft/Cover” is Walton’s first museum exhibition. It is a homecoming of sorts for the 34-year-old, the youngest in an international roster of artists, including Philadelphians Armando Veve, Tristin Lowe, Aimee Koran, Isaiah Zagar, and Will Stokes Jr., who recently died.

Walton, who grew up in South Jersey and cut her design teeth in New York City after graduating from Parsons School of Design in 2012, recently moved to Milan, a city that inspires her with its mid-century architecture, elegant entryways, and well-dressed elderly residents. She admires the sciura, “an older Milanese woman who dresses very chicly; everything is color-paletted in a perfect way that matches down to her dog and her hair.”

Like a sciura, Walton also has a wirehaired dachshund, a breed she calls “accountant dogs … looking [like] old men with bushy eyebrows and mustaches who will do your taxes.”

In late 2023, Bergdorf Goodman, the New York luxury clothing store, commissioned Walton to paint a group of shopping bags. One such is on display with a trompe-l’oeil painted blue French lace bra as if it were falling out from the top while nonchalantly carried by its buyer. On the reverse, the artist hand-painted the words: “She bought something sexy and she doesn’t care if you like it.”

The exhibit’s other work from Walton is a sleeveless dress from the late 1950s/early 1960s found in a wardrobe filled with vintage French apparel at a villa near Bordeaux that the artist’s friend had purchased. “I like the idea of using this mysterious housewife’s pink dress as the base,” the artist said. With fabric paint and stencils, she hand-lettered the following words on the dress: “I can’t believe it I forgot to have children” on it.

The statement came from a Roy Lichtenstein-inspired vintage 1980 screen-printed T-shirt by Screen Stars that Walton, who considers “the body as a billboard,” wears often. The letters forming children are strategically positioned as if they are “falling out the uterus.” The dress, which the artist had worn in New York, aptly hangs in the show “in conversation” with an authentic limited-edition Lichtenstein silk shirt (1979).

Interestingly, her pieces are displayed near a group of four costumes (2018) by Suzanne Bocanegra that was created for an installation film that reenacted Judy Garland’s wardrobe screen tests. As a child in Gloucester County, Walton said she loved watching classic films with “women who seemed so ethereal … creating personalities through what they wore.”

As part of the 90 or so works on view, there are sculptural ensembles by Ken Dawson Little that indicate what is collaboratively possible when working with the Fabric Workshop’s team of in-house studio artists and technicians. Rose and Bud (1987) brings together a black tuxedo covered in buttons and a white dress embellished with buttonholes. Hellerman referred to this as “an implied performance of intimacy.” A year later, the artist designed Bread Couple, Buck and Doe, a man’s suit and a lady’s dress constructed entirely with 450 real U.S. one-dollar bills using currency as cloth.

Walton vividly remembers childhood vintage shopping trips with her mother, an exhibiting quilter and former German teacher, who loved “the thrill of the hunt.” She and her sisters were taken to Cowtown Flea Market, the Old Mill Antique Mall in Mullica Hill, estate sales, and even Goodwill. These outings nurtured her core aesthetic sensibility.

Donoghue, cocurator of the show, appreciates the artist’s “unique eye for vintage … and knowledge of fashion and textiles,” which is “totally in the spirit of what we imagined for this exhibition.”

Walton’s contributions speak to female empowerment. She expressed empathetic concern for “women [who] feel like they don’t have the autonomy to make decisions with their own bodies or how they may want to cover their bodies.” These thoughts have been percolating, especially since she has been posting on social media for a decade and is regularly judged by readers.

“As a woman in art and especially as a woman in fashion, people don’t take you seriously. … It’s up to you to decide what’s appropriate,” Walton said. “Clothing has always been artistic to me, a form of self-expression.”