Sometimes the threads that connect us reverberate with grief, rage, and redemption. Nick Cave has made “sound suits” since the 1990s. A response to the beating of Rodney King, an unarmed Black man, by police in Los Angeles in 1991, as well as his own racial profiling by police, Cave’s suits mask the wearer’s identity. Instead, the focus is on the glitter, sparkle, and rustling of found materials that comprise the costume and are activated when the wearer dances—which the artist often does. Recuperating materials as well as memory, Cave offers this work as an act of care that echoes out into the wider Black community and beyond. He reflected in 2016, “My mother told me when I was eight years old the complexity of what I would have to deal with [as a Black man in the United States], and so knowing made me think, I have to build a thick skin.”

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