The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) presents Memorabilia, an exhibition of new work by multi-instrumentalist, composer, and theater artist Cynthia Hopkins (Brooklyn, NY) that memorializes several of the artist’s large-scale, music theater performances. In Memorabilia, the materials collected from the detritus of Hopkins’ performance pieces—such as hundreds of pages of hand-written notes the artist scribbled during the process of devising songs, stories, characters, and costumes, as well as fragments of her costumes and props—are “woven” into five double-sided large-scale “quilts” made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Each piece allows Hopkins to communicate a story about a specific performance piece in fragmented, folkloric form through arranged materials, embroidered lyrics, and hand-drawn diagrams. Hopkins’ new sound piece will permeate the installation to create a cohesive narrative for the new works on display.
This exhibit, Memorabilia, will serve the purpose memorials are intended to serve: to celebrate, and put to rest, what is no longer living (so that those mourning the loss of the person or thing can move on with their lives) while simultaneously enriching the present with a remembrance of things past (so that those who may not be familiar with the thing memorialized may potentially learn from it, or be curious about it, or shed a tear for its loss). — Cynthia Hopkins
Cynthia Hopkins: Memorabilia is part of FWM’s ongoing series, Convergence: Declarations of Independence, which presents to the Philadelphia community the energy and creativity of artists working outside traditional centers of the art world.