I was new in town, having moved to the Detroit suburbs from the Kansas City suburbs to go to grad school at Cranbrook Academy of Art. A few doors down from my house was this great coffee shop called Bella’s and I had become friends with some of the regulars. As I was exploring more my relationship to clothing I wanted to engage others in thinking about their clothing and the clothing of others in terms other than fashion or self expression. On three different evenings I would personally survey everyone in the coffeeshop and then ask that they wear a temporary label with the information about their clothing on their body so that everyone else could learn about each other. I took photo documentation and then installed these posters with the images and information on site at the coffee shop. I convinced everyone in the Sculpture Dept to drive 15 minutes over to the coffeeshop so that we could critique the work in situ. A majority of the students bought coffee or a snack during the critique. No one was that particularly impressed with the work and questioned why it was necessary to schlep over there to talk about the work when we could clearly just look at the documentation at school. It was important to me that we be in the place of the work rather than view it from an extractive standpoint, and most importantly it was important to me that we spend our money at the establishment that I knew wasn;t doing well financially. Looking back this was one of my proudest moments in art school where I could create a social and economic exchange under the auspices of art and other people would go along with it!

— Andy T