Women’s History Museum

Company is pleased to present Museum Manu, an exhibition by Women's History Museum, the fashion-art duo founded by Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan in 2015.

Through interdisciplinary collaboration, Barringer and McGowan use fashion as a tool to rewrite history and to reimagine the construct of beauty. Their work operates in a space between performance, sculpture, photography, and archival research—fusing the material culture of clothing with the psychic realities of embodiment. Their practice interrogates the structures of display and collection, questioning the authority of institutions while proposing alternate methods of recording and preserving cultural memory.

Museum Manu centers on a selection of sculptural footwear that blurs the boundaries between garment and body. The forms are animalistic, predatory, and at times grotesque—evoking talons, hooves, and prosthetics. These are not merely accessories, but vessels of transformation, reflecting the duo's ongoing interest in fashion's potential to alter identity and expand the human form. Vintage athletic gear and lingerie inflected silhouettes are reconfigured into uncanny hybrids that speak to strength, vulnerability, and defiance.

Installed on layered, image-saturated plinths that resemble magazine spreads or digital archives, the shoes sit like artifacts from an alternate past—or a speculative future. Some appear carved or melted, others patched with ephemera, photographs, or hand-painted slogans. The surface textures recall riot gear, fetish objects, or relics of revolt. In this landscape, the shoes become stand-ins for bodies in flux: feminine, masculine, animal, post-human. They are instruments of desire and disruption, inviting viewers to consider what we wear when language fails.

Several videos anchor the exhibition, each excerpted from Women's History Museum's original runway performances. Far from traditional fashion presentations, these filmed works operate as theatrical tableaux—part ritual, part protest, part dream. The videos loop silently or with ambient sound, offering glimpses into the duo's immersive world-building and collaborative ethos. Together with the footwear, they form a portrait of fashion not as commodity, but as a mode of storytelling, rebellion, and speculative memory.

This is Women's History Museum's third solo show at Company. Other recent solo exhibitions include Screens, Forde, Geneva (2024); The Massive Disposal of Experience, Company Gallery, New York and CCA, Berlin (2022); 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). Their work has been acquired by the permanent collection of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. They will have a solo show at the Amant Foundation in Brooklyn this upcoming fall 2025.