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Sculpture Center shows emphasize touchable comfort, play and care

CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s a tough world out there. Who couldn’t use a little comfort amid soft, pillowy art suitable for cuddling, napping and play time?

Cleveland’s nonprofit Sculpture Center is addressing the hard, mean, angry edge of contemporary culture with a new installation by Tommy Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American artist based in New York and Philadelphia.

The show, titled “may the PLUSH be with you,” has transformed the Sculpture Center’s main gallery into a curvy, womblike enclosure lined with stretchy membranes of colorful, vibrantly patterned cotton and polyester fabric.

Nguyen’s installation is populated with playful looking stuffed sculptures resembling multi-armed octopuses or jellyfish that have congregated in an underwater world resembling a psychedelic kelp forest. The show invites visitors to squeeze or snuggle Nguyen’s creations. Some crinkle while others give way gently like a soft child’s plush toy.

Undersea world above ground

The experience brings to mind filmmaker Craig Foster’s 2020 feature about how he spent a year free diving in a real kelp forest off the coast of South Africa, where he developed a relationship with a friendly octopus.

Visitors can dive into Nguyen’s colorful, utopian environment without holding their breath or dealing with cold seawater. Yet the show is unquestionably immersive. It submerges the Sculpture Center’s rugged, brick architecture in yards of billowy, weightless fabric. It camouflages right angles and rough textures. And it blocks views of the outside world by covering windows with quilted swaths of cloth that resemble free-form compositions in stained glass.

Nguyen, who teaches at Pace University in New York, has a strong, intuitive sense that a zeitgeist rife with threats of political violence and news of real wars in Gaza and Ukraine calls for evocations of comfort and escape.

By exploring the possibilities of soft sculpture, Nguyen has placed himself within a venerable tradition in modern and contemporary art. Earlier examples of the genre include Claes Oldenburg’s soft toilets, hamburgers and toothpaste tubes. Nguyen’s interest in bold patterns and curvy, feminine forms brings to mind bulbous boldly colored sculptures of women by French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

His work also echoes the playful spirit of the Museum of Modern Art 1970 exhibition, “The New Italian Landscape,” which included Gaetano Pesce’s “Donna” armchair, a stretchy construction with breasts and a broad, enveloping pelvis that appears to be giving birth to an ottoman.

Nguyen evokes such precedents without direct references. His imagery is decidedly aquatic, but his ebullient, generous and playful persona seems in line with previous advocates of soft sculpture and furniture.

His show at the Sculpture Center has a great sense of being tailored to a specific place. It also feels fully realized without a great deal of huffing and puffing.

It’s a welcoming invitation to step out of the everyday grind and have a little fun. Importantly, it also dispenses with the usual “do not touch” prohibition exercised by museums and galleries.

It’s easy to imagine how families with young children could let off a little steam in Nguyen’s “plush” world. His lighthearted sensibility is a gift.

Zero Waste Mothering

The Sculpture Center’s second current exhibition, featuring a blouse designed by Detroit-based artist Margaret Hull for breastfeeding mothers, is less satisfying as an experience.

As a new mother, Hull, an assistant professor at Wayne State University, became aware of what the Sculpture Center describes as “the secondhand circular economy of baby clothes.” She also felt a need to reimagine postpartum and maternity wear in ways that could provide new options beyond currently available garments, which center described as “notoriously dowdy” and of “limited use.”

Hull set herself the task of coming up with a new kind of blouse that could be constructed from a single large square of fabric with zero waste from cutouts and throwaway scraps.

The garment is designed to provide modesty for the wearer, along with the possibility that another person could help position the blouse when used for its intended purpose. This, as the gallery states, would be a “performative gesture that serves as a metaphor for the community of care Hull experienced in parenthood.”

All of that sounds wonderful, but the resulting garment, produced in multiples and hung on hangers in the storefront section of the Sculpture Center raises more questions than it answers.

It’s not clear from the display exactly how the blouse would function in ways that would live up to its written description. The design features flowing forms with a simple, billowy drape from the shoulders, and a large diagonal flap opening from below the neck to allow access for breastfeeding.

There are no photographs of models wearing the garment or discreetly demonstrating its use, nor are there demonstrations of how a second person would “position” the garment to demonstrate participation in a “community of care.”

Hull is right to decry waste in the apparel industry, but her exhibit feels thin and not fully realized. More work is needed to bring her worthy ideas to full realization.

Art Review

What’s up: Tommy Nguyen’s “may the PLUSH be with you,” and Margaret Hull’s “Zero Waste Mothering.”

Venue: The Sculpture Center, Cleveland.

When: Through Saturday, Aug. 24.