A Conversation with Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer of Women's History Museum


text by Karly Quadros

It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stilettos. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.

Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.

Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.

Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City.


KARLY QUADROS: Can you tell me about the inception of the show?

AMANDA MCGOWAN: We started working with Taylor Trabulus at Company many years ago.  Not very long after we started, she wanted to do a pop-up shop with us.

We were gonna maybe do an art show with her in the city at some other gallery, but there was drama and it didn't work out. Then she got promoted at Gavin Brown where she was working at the time, and basically she out of nowhere gave us this big art show opportunity there in 2018. After Gavin Brown ended [in 2020], she went to Company Gallery and we did another solo show there, and then they signed us on as artists. We've been working with them since Covid, like 2021. 

This show was actually their idea. It was their idea to do an overview of all the shoes that we've done over the past five years because we actually didn't realize how many we have done. There’s a lot and they're all different. Some have been seen in an art context. Some were in fashion shows. But in a way, they work as standalone art objects, so it made sense to show them in that way. 

The displays that we created for the show, those platforms, were actually wall works that we did for the show at Company in 2021. We made all these prints on paper and then we did these collages imitating ads because that show in 2021 was about recreating an abandoned mall space. The panels were to mimic advertising or storefront environments.

QUADROS: The shoe is such a deceptively simple concept, but there’s a lot that emerges when you see them all next to each other like that. At Autre, our last issue just went to press and the theme was ‘desire.’ We actually had Mia Khalifa on the cover wearing your paw shoe.

MCGOWAN: I saw that! We were talking recently – speaking of desire – about how there is such a sexual element to shoes, a sensuality.

QUADROS: They’re the ultimate fetish object.

MCGOWAN: They are. There’s something about seeing the shoe alone too, not on a foot, which is its own fetish.

QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about how fetish and sexuality play into your design practice here in the show and elsewhere?

MCGOWAN: I feel like clothes have such a relationship to those topics because there’s such a rapport with the human form, with the body. I feel like it’s one of the reasons it’s not considered an art form because it has this feminine and bodily quality to it that makes it segmented away from formal art world consideration for most people.

MATTIE RIVKAH BARRINGER: There’s just so much loaded with fashion mentally for people. Women are expected to be sexually available or sexually pleasing in a patriarchal society, and clothing is such an interesting way to interfere in those types of codes and signals and take ownership over being specimenized in this way as a woman. 

MCGOWAN: Inherently, clothing and shoes are binding the body. There is this kind of BDSM quality to clothing, and shoes specifically – there’s something about a heel controlling the foot, constricting it, the animal claw within the shoe. There’s something very animalic about human feet – this kind of unruly, weird part of the body – and aestheticizing and controlling it with this beautiful shoe. 

We use a lot of animalic references in the shoes as well. There’s something about female sexuality and animal prints, animal symbology that I feel is somehow connected. Specifically in the fashion industry and in art history, the connection between the animal and the sexual and the woman is so saturated in the imagery. It also, I think, has been interpreted in contemporary feminism perhaps as a degrading comparison. We’re interested in that comparison because I feel like there can be a degrading aspect of it, but then there’s also this other countercurrent where it is kind of positive: I think of Jungian psychology, the positive anima where you’re in this positive relationship acknowledging the animal side of yourself as a human animal. Something about that to us is interesting or empowering to think about. 

And yet, at the same time, we’re trying to point out the possibly negative ways that humans can be animals towards each other in a very cruel world. There’s a lot of very dualistic things about the whole animal reference that is interesting to us in our work.

QUADROS: It’s interesting because fashion is one of the major things that separates humans from animals. We adorn our bodies; animals do not. There’s something maybe post-human about it – does that resonate with you?

BARRINGER:  I feel like throughout time, women and animals have been exploited and used in a lot of ways. So there's also that connection where there's something inherently feminine perhaps about animals too.

MCGOWAN: Everybody does participate in adorning themselves whether or not they consider themselves interested in fashion. It's an activity that is distinctly human.

BARRINGER: In its more negative permutations, the actual industry and making of clothing has a cruelty that we could attribute to like the animalistic behavior of just devouring and consumption.

QUADROS: Some of the shoes – for instance the ones with the bent and broken hooves – recall the sculptures of Meret Oppenheim. I also think of the cloven toe of Margiela tabis, which I’ve seen elicit really strong reactions from people who aren’t invested in fashion. Can you talk a little bit about your exploration of abjection, the uncanny, and yuckiness in your work?

MCGOWAN:  There's such a fine line between femininity being beautiful and being abject.  Within the patriarchal reality spectacle, if a woman has too much makeup and you can tell that she's wearing makeup, it's grotesque, but if she's wearing the type of makeup that really makes her look natural or youthful, then she's beautifully feminine.

We’re very interested in this historical time travel – what the codes were at one time that are different from now and how different depictions and ideals of femininity throughout time contradict the ones we have now.

BARRINGER: Also living in New York City is so abject. We’re very close to abjection all the time. There’s something very medieval about being in New York City. When I’m making something that I think is beautiful, it makes sense to have something abject as part of it in a weird way because it feels like that’s the world that I’m in. It feels more true.

QUADROS: Do you guys have any gross or crazy New York stories?

MCGOWAN: My God, where do I begin? The first show that we did that was a big production last February, somebody punched Mattie in the face on the subway, literally going to see the venue.

QUADROS: Oh my God, I’m so sorry.

MCGOWAN: I feel like New York City has gotten so crazy. It’s like an open air institution.

BARRINGER: I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a dead body yet in New York. I feel like the area we’re in feels so charged from a past time. Looking into New York history, that area used to be like the financial district. It was a port because it’s right on the water, and there was crazy stuff happening there throughout time. You can feel that history.

QUADROS: I feel like that’s certainly reflected in New York fashion right now. Your clothes feel really interested in the messiness or the intensity of the city.

MCGOWAN: I think it feels more, like you’re saying, like the reality. We’re in a time where you’re very confronted with reality. There is a need for fantasy as well, which we try to do, but we also need to acknowledge the reality at the same time.

BARRINGER: Fantasy needs to be mitigated with something that feels more honest to us.

QUADROS: New York is so known for its extremely functional shoes – power suits and sneakers, squishy foamy Crocs. They have to be functional since it’s a city ruled by pedestrians. Meanwhile the shoes in the show are distinctly less functional: towering wooden platforms, Victorian-style shin braces. What do you think of when you think of New York footwear? How do your own designs work with or against that?

MCGOWAN: Mattie has always worn platforms since I’ve known her for the past fifteen years.

BARRINGER: I find platforms easy to walk in, but I just have always wanted to be taller. I’m five foot three, so I always wanted to be tall.

MCGOWAN: She always wears Vivienne Westwood rocking horse shoes, which for me, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk around the city in them, but for her, they’re comfortable. 

BARRINGER: I like being above street level when I can ‘cause it feels very beautiful. I feel cleaner somehow.

QUADROS: My dear friend who lived here for a long time told me when I moved here, don’t wear open-toed shoes unless it’s a platform because a rat will run over your feet.

BARRINGER: (laughs) A hundred percent. My husband, he’s from Singapore, so he likes wearing open-toed shoes, and he only wears flats. He’s the only New Yorker that I’ve ever seen who wears sandals on the ground.

MCGOWAN: I do think there’s an obsession. For me, I wouldn’t wear heels all the time in New York. We’re interested in the fantasy of what shoes could be. If I could make a shoe that I could wear every day, not in a practical way, what would it look like? That’s how they also become an art object because they’re not really functional things. These ones have a bit of a defensive quality, like they have a weapon built in basically.

BARRINGER: We felt so enveloped in the New York atmosphere. We were really looking at the buildings and the statues. This post-human thing where you are becoming the city, the metal and the hard building materials felt like something that we were really talking about with the clothes we were doing in the last year.

QUADROS: In many ways, it’s the exact opposite of the ballet flat, which has recently come back.

MCGOWAN: And it’s not comfortable either. I used to wear ballet flats all the time when I was younger, and my feet always hurt.

BARRINGER: There’s no support.

MCGOWAN: I’m always frustrated with shoe options. My whole life, I’m always dissatisfied with what’s available and what is functional but attractive. Even though there’s a lot of shoes, a lot of them are not great in different ways.

QUADROS: What have you settled on now?

MCGOWAN: I wear Marithé Francois Girbaud vintage shoes because there’s something about the split soles, the rubber shoe, it laces up the front. It’s a supportive ankle situation. Something about the way that those shoes are made are so comfortable to me but they’re also attractive. Like they don’t look like grandma.

The boys in New York City will stop me all the time and be like, “Bro, your shoes are so sick.” And I’m just like, “They’re just comfortable.”

QUADROS: When you’re sourcing now, where are you looking in terms of beauty and inspiration?

MCGOWAN: It’s almost like we’re thinking about archaeology or something. Our practice of souring materials and vintage can feel quite archaeological and specific, looking for, I don’t know, maybe a narrative or an untold story. I think for our next collection we’re thinking about archaeology as this search for self and identity through clothing and also thinking of these as artifacts or monumental objects.

I don’t think we’re going to do an actual fashion show. We’re going to do a lookbook in tandem with an art exhibition, so we’re also thinking of clothing that’s going to stand on its own and not really have to be in movement.

BARRINGER: We always think of ourselves as weird time travelers from a time that didn’t exist. Like historical futurism.

QUADROS: The Fifth Element. Spaceships, but also the pyramids.

BARRINGER: Exactly. There’s so much history and so many stories, people’s individuality that we don’t know about throughout time.

QUADROS: So you’re not doing New York Fashion Week then?

MCGOWAN: We are not this year. We might release a lookbook around Fashion Week, but we’re not doing a show until next year. We’re burnt out. We’re very interested in doing more shows in the future. We really want to take time to do a show in Paris in the future. So we just need to regroup and take time. 

Fashion moves so fast, and it’s not always realistic to create things at that level when you’re self-funded. It’s just us and our interns. It’s not like we have a giant team. For us, this has been the most rigorous fashion schedule that we’ve shown on. It’s been three shows within the space of a year.

And doing runway is a lot. It doesn’t look like it’s as much work as doing an art show or an exhibition, but it’s actually so much harder in comparison when you don’t have endless resources to pour into it. It’s one of the hardest types of creation because there’s not only the functionality of the garment, there’s the live element. It’s basically working for six months on something that’s gonna be seen for twenty minutes. You have to have so many relationships and people involved. In New York especially it’s hard to find venues. It’s a whole thing.

QUADROS: Fashion Week is in a weird place right now too. Your show in particular had a lot of buzz, a lot of really positive responses that what you’re doing is something unique.

MCGOWAN: Thank you. And we don’t wanna abandon New York. I think a lot of our inspiration and identity is very linked to this place, but it’s an experiment that we want to show in Paris. We’re also interested in French fashion history and that lineage. So it feels like a personal goal.

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

Everything She Touches Turns to Gold: an Interview of Colette Lumiere

interview by Karly Quadros

Fuck art, let’s dance.

It’s the attitude that Colette Lumiere had become known for, immortalized in a mural that she painted on the wall of iconic ’70s downtown New York nightclub and art scene haunt Danceteria. She’s celebrated for her bold personas and expansive multimedia projects from street art to installations to fashion collaborations, yet her later evolutions have received less attention. A new show at Company Gallery, Everything She Touches Turns to Gold, running until March 1, explores the artist’s career in the ’80s as she ventured off to Berlin under the guise of a new persona, the mysterious Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes.

Lumiere always had a surprisingly contemporary attitude toward blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, between art and commerce. She began by painting cryptic sigils on the SoHo pavement at night and has shown art everywhere from the MoMA to Fiorucci shop windows to German nunneries to nightclubs. Her longest running piece was a 24/7 installation in her own apartment, stuffed from floor to ceiling with champagne and blush-ruched fabrics, a polymorphous punk rock Versailles. Lumiere took that louche crinkling of fabric from her Living Environment and translated it into harlequin frocks that she wore like a uniform. Her influence reverberates widely from Vivienne Westwood and Madonna’s ragged, spunky takes on period clothing to the elaborately staged personas of Cindy Sherman and Nadia Lee Cohen.

Growing frustrated with the limitations put on a young female artist, in 1978 Lumiere staged her own death in a performance at the Whitney Museum. She emerged a few days later at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, beginning an ongoing dynasty of artistic personas and eras. Everything She Touches Turns to Gold features the artist’s under-celebrated paintings, mostly from the early ’80s, “metaphysical portraits” exploring herself, her friends, and the subconscious. While her ’70s works recall historical reclining nudes including staged photos and durational performances in which she napped in poses modeled after classical paintings such as Manet’s Olympia. Her Berlin period, instead, foregrounded motion. The figures in her portraits wave. They evade. They drift and dream and run away.

I recently met up with Lumiere at Company Gallery to explore the new collection. Now in her  seventies, Lumiere is as true to herself as ever in a ruffled white blouse beneath a hot pink Victorian riding coat. Tunisian-born and French-raised, her accent is caught somewhere between her native French and a dry German lilt. We spoke about Berlin before the wall came down, resisting categorization, and, of course, potatoes.

KARLY QUADROS:  I wanted to focus on the gallery show because it covers this specific period of time: Berlin in the ’80s. Rather than focusing on performances and living spaces, this one is much more concerned with visual art and paintings. A lot of what is written about you concerns a smaller period of time: a lot of your ’70s work, your show at the Whitney where you killed your first persona. But there's still several decades of artwork after that.

COLETTE LUMIERE:  Interesting how people focus on one thing to describe you. They get set.

I really began as a painter. But it wasn't long before I got restless. It was in the air. I was very naïve, and I wasn't coming from Yale or whatever. I was coming from nowhere, actually. It was before street art became popular. There was a bar on Spring Street where I did a lot of my graffiti work. I always had an accomplice, a friend, a girlfriend or somebody helping me out, watching for the police

Simultaneously, I was creating the environments that I lived in. I got intrigued with using space in a different way. This was a time where art changed completely, and unconsciously, I was picking up on that.

I used to go to the nightclubs. It was at Max's Kansas City. No place like it ever again.

The people hanging out there were all famous artists. They were [Colette adopts a macho stance] men, and I was a young girl and I usually had another young girl with me. But one night I met [land artist Robert] Smithson, and we had a long conversation. I said I had learned about him and we were doing the same thing. I think he was rolling his eyes. He had other ideas in mind, but we took him to my place, which was near where he lived and he walked in my environment and then he sobered up. We gave him a cup of coffee, and we talked about art. And from then on, he introduced me to everyone. Richard Serra, Carl Andre. That was my beginning.

QUADROS:  Why did you decide to go to Berlin?

LUMIERE:  Sometimes I just like to give up. Surrender. You always want to plan your life, and then sometimes I find it's best to surrender.

So, I was really at that stage of my life, where my Living Environment had come to an end. I think I was ready to be dismantled. I lived in an artwork that was ongoing. It was very extreme, and I was part of that artwork. And there was another element, which was my landlord, who tried to throw me out from the beginning [laughs]. So it was coming to a climax. And then I get this invitation to go to Berlin. How convenient! 

I don't know why I'm talking about my past again. This is really a problem I've noticed. But this show is Mata Hari. We're talking the ’80s! Berlin was a new beginning. 

QUADROS: Who is Mata Hari the persona?

LUMIERE:  Actually, I didn't know at all about Mata Hari the person when I chose that name. The reason I chose Mata Hari was because I knew she was a spy… You had this image. The Berlin Wall was not that far away.

None of my personas are actually about the name. A lot of people think Olympia, it's Olympia from Manet, Justine, it's de Sade, but none of them are. Of course Mata Hari has something to do with the name, but I had to make something new out of her. So, it became Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes. It was the potatoes because it was the food for Germany. Then stolen made it more mysterious, dangerous. That's what I felt Berlin would be like. I would take pictures of myself, running like somebody was going to catch me, like the police or the Gestapo.

I got into [the show’s videos] because it's really old footage. One of them was staged at the opera where I did a music video that was interrupted by the police. I have a tendency to do things I should not do for the sake of art, of course, because I'm obsessed. I had the approval of the director who I had done sets and costumes for at the Berlin Opera.

We were just starting to rehearse. It was a potato song, which is in the show as well. It was called, “Did You Eat?” Well, apparently that was not legal. And everybody came out from the kitchen, from the offices. “What is going on here?” And here I am doing my music video rehearsing. We were just at the beginning, and the police came. And I said, “You're not gonna stop this.” I said to everybody working with the band, “Let's just go. Let's just finish it.” At the end, my wig is like half down. People don't know this when they see the video.

QUADROS: What was the Berlin art community like?

LUMIERE: At the beginning there was a lot of resistance for me, and there usually is. I've noticed this everywhere I go. First of all, I'm a foreigner. And number two, it was the height of the wild painters, the Berlin guys – Lüpertz and Rainer Fetting. It was a whole crew of them. They were very macho, and they ruled the scene. They were very serious, and they drank a lot, and they were very depressed. And here I am, bringing my art to a nightclub. I took a boyfriend's Volkswagen and I painted it and put the potatoes in. I arrived in the Volkswagen, and I did an installation in the nightclub they all went to. It was called, There's a New Girl in Town.

This German art magazine came out with a story that art in the nightclubs is what's happening. In New York, there was Palladium. It was where all the big artists like Schnabel, Clemente, Keith Haring, Basquiat, and Colette [went], but Colette was on her own always. So, it explained how I kind of started that way back before in Danceteria. Then they were respectful. Then I won them over, and they were nice to me.

QUADROS: Can you speak a little about the Silk to Marble series? Many things come up for me: the seductress, a statue of Venus, a nun, decommissioned artwork covered in a sheet, perhaps even a dead body covered in a sheet.

LUMIERE:  Well, you just described it. It's not that I'm against high tech or having a big budget, but usually I don't have either available. So I'm very good at transforming material. It was an evening at home bored and I'm leaving, [so I said] “Let's make some art!” I had this one sheet. It was very organic. Organic is a big word in my work. 

They were first exhibited in Berlin, in the house, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, which was beautiful because it was a nunnery, so it had these oval religious arches, white walls. It was perfect for the series. And then out of nowhere at the opening, I appeared behind one of the columns way up – the ceilings were unbelievably high – and there was special music composed for that performance.

QUADROS: A lot of your performance work is inspired by art history and the canon, often subverting or playing with classical images. But these “metaphysical portraits” seem to come from somewhere else entirely. What can the world of dreaming offer us?

LUMIERE:  My art was trying to reach the invisible, the unknown. That's what I'm reaching out for… I don't care what the trend is… I don't like trends because trends are things that happen and leave, and I'm interested in the eternal. Artists – I guess they’re called visionaries – they follow that line, and they're mystical in a way. I try to stay away from describing myself as that, but that's what interested me from the beginning: the metaphysics, magic, the mystery of life and art. I'm always seeking for another dimension. That's what my soul is looking for, and whatever way I can manifest it, whether it's canvas or performance, that's my goal.

The feminine influence is a big thing too. Now it's much easier for women, but at the time I was doing it, my work was labeled feminine, like it was an insult. Even the women were insulted by me. Like I was an insult. Because I impressed my femininity in my paintings and the way I dressed. I always have fun anyway. That's another thing. Fun is very important. 

QUADROS: You like to build the whole world.  It can't just stay in the gallery. It has to be in the streets, and in the club, and in the bedroom. 

LUMIERE: In the bedroom, yes!

QUADROS: Were you part of the punks?

LUMIERE: Oh yeah, of course. But I also wasn’t. I was never a part of anything is what I’m trying to tell you. In the clubs it was so cool to be mean! [Colette adopts a snarl and a tough pose.] I like punk, but I don’t like it when it goes in a very negative direction. So I created my own thing, which was a contradiction. I added the Victorian look, the soft look, and mixed it up with the tough look because it was only black, black, black.

QUADROS: It’s interesting because Victorian fashion is very confined and restricted, like a corset. But your clothing is much lighter and more playful.

LUMIERE: Well by 1980, I was getting restless to get rid of my Environment, but I wasn’t really ready. So, I started wearing it. It was an experiment in walking architecture. The whole idea was to use space in a different way.

I work very intuitively and later, I get what I meant, you know? I think intuition has its own intelligence. We live in a culture where intellect is so celebrated, not that that doesn’t have its role. For me, it’s always been about the unity of the mind, body, and the emotions. There’s a cerebral part of my work. There’s an emotional quality. I think this show reflects that. 

QUADROS: Do you think you can explore something with painting that you can’t reach with performance or fashion or music?

LUMIERE: I love it and I don’t love it. I’m a loner, really. I like my private life. But it’s a contradiction because I also like to have large audiences and speak to lots of people. Painters are usually by themselves. With fashion and with music and with all of the other parts, I’d probably do a lot more, but I don’t want to because this is my first love. Being who I am and on my own time, that’s me.

QUADROS: I do think you were forward-thinking being so multidisciplinary. Nowadays, it’s so hard for people to make a living doing just one thing. So you see artists that collaborate with fashion designers or build window displays, all the things you used to do.

LUMIERE: I was always interested in pushing that line between art and commerce. And now it’s merged. And I don’t approve of that. But I pushed it.

QUADROS: Do you feel responsible for the people you’ve influenced?

LUMIERE: No, because in the end it’s not me. But it is interesting.


Everything She Touches Turns to Gold is on view through March 1 @ Company Gallery in New York City at 145 Elizabeth St.