The Clothes Make The Man

In 1999, I was invited to create a site-specific installation for the Whatcom Museum of History and Art. During multiple visits to the museum, I discovered that the building itself was the old police station and jailhouse. Through further investigation, I found that Bellingham was one west coast city involved in the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940's. I became interested in the fact that the current museum was likely the jailhouse that held the Zoot Suitors and that in the museum archives, I was able to locate photographs of the officers who were employed during the time of the riots. I was able to locate a copy of an original front page of the local paper with mention of the riots. I fabricated a new story to replace the existing story about the happenings. In creation of the characters for the paper, I photographed individuals in period costume to illustrate the article and to mount in context with the police portraits. I also created two sound pieces for the space. One was the story of the riots as told by one "victim," and the other was a narrative montage created from original dialog contained in the Luis Valdez film "Zoot Suit." These sound pieces were played through headphones located on and around period costumes.