The Raclin Murphy is excited to host Brendan Fernandes in the Museum for a second performance inspired by art, artifacts, and their legacy. Noise See investigates themes of visibility, protest, colonial residue, and embodied resistance. Central to the work are custom-crafted, vibrant quilted tapestries and costumes; the vivid magenta and purple plaid textile is commonly associated with contemporary Maasai culture in Kenya, yet is rooted in British colonial influence.
Performed as a duet, dancers engage in a choreographic dialogue—merging and separating, concealing and revealing—through a language of camouflage and emergence. The performers activate the double-sided tapestries throughout the Museum’s atrium, transforming them into blankets, shields, protest banners, cloaks, and second skins. These dynamic textiles, with irregular folds, drapes, and appendages, become agents of change, shaping and being shaped by the dancers’ movements.
Noise See reclaims a colonial textile legacy and transforms it into a site of protest, protection, and presence. Here, Fernandes insists that silence is not absence, but a resonant and radical form of resistance.
Fernandes is the 2025 Artist-in-Residence in the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience. He presented the site-specific commissioned piece Moving Through—written in collaboration with Notre Dame students and performed by five dancers throughout the galleries—in April, and parts of it will be reprised in the Museum on Friday, October 3. These performances and other opportunities to engage with Fernandes are made possible through collaboration among, and support from the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity, Fernandes’s projects take hybrid forms to address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. He is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award and received a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Fernandes is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have been shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal), among a great many others. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Fernandes is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), MCA Denver, The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), and Prospect 6 (New Orleans).
Brendan Fernandes, Noise See, 2025. Commissioned by The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Costumes created in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Maasai shuka, batting, cotton. Dimensions variable. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.
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