Iké Udé

The person in this artwork wears clothes and has items from different places. It makes me think about travel. Going to new places and learning new things has been a dream I have had ever since I was little. When I was 12 I went to North Carolina. Traveling there was inspiring because of all the beautiful things they have compared to Pawtucket—vast gardens and clean, large houses! Seeing new places with their own traditions can be eye-opening, like how Thanksgiving just seemed to be richer there. 

Still to this day I think about what traveling the world would be like. 

–Bee Barbles, RAC member

In his Sartorial Anarchy self-portraits, New York-based Nigerian-born artist Ike Ude creates composite images of the dandy across geography and chronology. Ude photographs himself in disparate ensembles, pairing, for example, a copy of an 18th-century Macaroni wig with other carefully selected vintage garments and reproductions. "The incongruous pairing of the familiar...with relatively unfamiliar items," he notes, "is where dandyism can be stoked, problematized, renewed, and appreciated as a protean plastic art." Ude fabricates a particularly exaggerated vision of the dandy, confronting and questioning the abuses of the past while also celebrating the present. In addition to his artistic practice, Ude is a consummate dandy himself, and appeared on Vanity Fair's 2012 best-dressed list.