Skin Tight

Skin Tight opens at the Carnegie Museum of Art's Forum Gallery on February 26, 2027, and runs through July 25. It brings together new work by two contemporary international artists, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola and Turiya Magadlela, both working with materials you'd recognize from a drugstore or a dresser drawer: nylon pantyhose and durags.

They treat these as ready-made objects—things that come into direct contact with a person's skin and hair—and layer them into pieces shaped by the fashion choices we make around identity. From there, the work moves into the fetishization and control of Black and Brown bodies. It's the kind of show that starts with something familiar and then pulls the thread until you're looking at something much heavier.

The exhibition is organized by assistant curator Alyssa Velazquez and is part of the museum's Forum series, which has been presenting the work of living artists since 1990 and has put on 86 projects to date. The series invites artists to expand their practice through a commission or a new presentation of existing work, and encourages them to use the museum's institutional resources—including the collection—as a springboard for inspiration, research, and creative exploration. Major support for the Forum series is provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation.

So, if you're in Pittsburgh, you've got plenty of time to catch this one: it opens February 26 at the Forum Gallery in the Carnegie Museum of Art and stays up through July 25.