Exhibition Walkthrough: Grisette à l'enfer with Women’s History Museum

Join Women’s History Museum with Amant’s Associate Curator Patricia Margarita Hernández, and Curatorial Assistant, Ariana Kalliga, for a walkthrough of Grisette à l’enfer, the collective’s first institutional solo presentation in the United States. The artists will share personal insights into their artistic process, the works on view, and the relationship between exhibition-making and fashion.

The exhibition at Amant lends its title from the grisette, a figure that emerged in 17th-century France to represent the working-class women behind the fashion industry. Grisette à l’enfer, or “Grisette in Hell,” invokes this archetype as a contemporary avatar of survival and exhaustion through newly commissioned sculptural installations, a couture garment series, and a set reminiscent of Théâtre de la Mode—a 1945 traveling exhibition of miniature haute couture mannequins. The exhibition mines retail culture to illuminate the overlooked spaces where style and fantasy have long converged.

Women’s History Museum was founded by Mattie Barringer (b. 1990) and Amanda McGowan (b. 1990) in 2015 out of the desire to create novel and previously unseen images of beauty. The duo engages with fashion as a medium that has the potential to exist beyond regurgitative spectacle and the ability to change the fabric of reality. Their art practice is dictated by meticulously sourced historical materials and collaborations with other artists who often double as models in their fashion shows. Solo exhibitions include Museum Manu (2025), Company Gallery, New York; Screens, Forde, Geneva (2024); The Massive Disposal of Experience, Company Gallery, New York and CCA, Berlin (2022); MORT de la MODE…Everything Must Go!, Company Gallery (2021), New York; Women’s History Museum Biennale: Poupées Gonflables, Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore (2019); Her Bed Surrounded by Machines, LUMA Westbau, Zurich (2018); OTMA’s Body, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2018). Recent group shows include those at Rumpelstiltskin and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York; Analog Gallery, Beacon, New York; Champ Lacombe, Biarritz, France; Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris; Performance Space, New York, and the Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia.

Host or Publisher Amant Foundation