Joan Silver’s hat is black, domed, and so big it hits the wearer’s shoulders. Its only decoration is a two-inch-wide vertical slit up the back. There’s also a smaller, almost invisible horizontal slit in front to see through; still, says Silver, “when you put it on, you’re pretty disoriented.”
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Chicagoan Barbara Zaretsky also uses a lot of black in the hats she makes, but you’d never mistake her work for Silver’s. One of her recent favorites is a small round canvas cap painted black with white triangles. While Zaretsky thinks of her hats as works of art, she also designs them to be worn, and she’s sold dozens of her creations since she started making them three years ago. “I like the idea of people seeing something that says “That expresses me,’ and then being able to buy it and wear it and keep expressing themselves.”
The result is a strange collection. There are hats made out of yarn, leather, wood, and even needlepoint net. Brigid Finucane’s “Helmet for the Goddess” looks like rusty metal, but it’s really fusible garment interfacing that she dipped in glue, dried with heat, and painted. On Elizabeth Salvia’s “Fish Hat,” the fish aren’t attached to the hat; they float inside netting that runs around the rim. The heads of more fish pop through the blue crown as if they’re jumping out of water.
Kling says the hats in this exhibit serve the same function as the clothes in the back of the closet that never get worn. “It gives me a good feeling to know they could be worn. You can look at them and daydream about when you might wear them and where you might wear them, but you never really have to. They create a fantasy.”
